In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins walk through the late-19th / early-20th century shift: cheap urban leisure (nickelodeons, dance halls, Coney Island), taxi dancers as proto-host clubs, shop girls hunting rich bosses, the rebrand of face-painting into “makeup,” the invention of “personality” and the It Girl, and 1920s petting parties. They argue modern dating is not an ancient institution that suddenly broke. It is a recent, low-commitment market that was controversial when it appeared — and that older courtship systems (family-supervised seasons, explicit marriage-seeking) may be more honest than ambiguous long-term dating.

Also discussed: why they treat dating as wife-hunting rather than “seeing where it goes,” why they want paying-for-dates destigmatized as traditional, and how RFAB can generate period-accurate 1920s stories.

RFab:

https://rfab.ai/

Substack:

Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Based Camp is a podcast exploring how humans process the world around them and the future of our species. We go into everything from human sexuality, to weird subcultures, dating markets, philosophy, and politics.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SimoneAndMalcolmCollins

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/EGFRjwwS92

Thematic timestamps

00:00 Dating used to rank below prostitution

00:59 Charity girls vs prostitutes

03:48 OnlyFans as the modern treating parallel

05:05 Paying for dates is not “trad”

06:51 Wife-hunting vs dating

07:20 Wikipedia on treating

09:14 London Season vs private one-on-one dates

11:28 Urban monoculture, flappers, and the 80/20

13:01 Where the word “treating” came from

14:01 Why they want 50/50 (or free) dates

17:02 Leisure time, nickelodeons, dance halls, Coney Island

20:20 Wage labor and why working-class women needed treating

22:33 From innocent treats to bills, clothes, and jewelry

26:21 A working-class urban practice, not an elite one

27:28 Reformers, vice squads, and military patrols

28:12 Taxi dance halls

28:25 Taxi dancers: American proto-host clubs

34:20 Shop girls and “marry the boss”

37:41 Face painting becomes “makeup”

41:07 Personality, rizz, and the It Girl

45:59 Dating-advice books and moral panic

47:12 Petting parties, necking, and snuggle pupping

50:33 Dating was always degenerate — rebuild the Season

53:27 Recreate 1920s dating on RFAB.ai

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I am right off learning a historical fact that blew my mind, which is that historically what we today call dating was seen as lower than prostitution-

[00:00:16] Simone Collins: Wait ...

[00:00:16] Malcolm Collins: until incredibly recently, up until the 1920s. Even our word date Historically meant visiting a prostitute.

[00:00:30] Simone Collins: I thought it was like an, an assignation or a something else.

That’s great. An

[00:00:35] Malcolm Collins: assignation?

[00:00:36] Simone Collins: Like, a rendezvous.

[00:00:38] Malcolm Collins: No, it did mean that. But you would never use it for a romantic rendezvous. You used it for business rendezvous. And then it began to be used to mean seeing a prostitute, and then it began to become applied way later during this period where dating had this bad reputation, to seeing what was called a charity woman.

[00:00:59] Simone Collins: A charity- So, and- A cha- what’s a charity woman?

[00:01:02] Malcolm Collins: W- it’s what today we would call a woman. Okay. So,

[00:01:06] Simone Collins: What, what... Oh, okay. Okay. Just, yeah. Okay. I’ll, I’ll say the main thing- What, spell this out for me.

[00:01:09] Malcolm Collins: This,

[00:01:09] Simone Collins: I’m

[00:01:10] Malcolm Collins: so confused ... differentiated a charity woman, okay?

[00:01:12] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:01:12] Malcolm Collins: So a charity woman would expect a man to pay for food or an activity.

[00:01:20] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:01:20] Malcolm Collins: And she would often court multiple men before getting married. Now, today this sounds like a woman. So we’re gonna go- Yes ... into what alerted me to this. We’re gonna go into the Wikipedia article on this. And even though, the the reason I cite this is even something as lefty as Wikipedia was like, “Oh yeah, this was considered a super, a bad thing to do.”

We’re gonna go into the campaigns- Oh ... to arrest these women. We’ll go into what prostitutes were saying about these women, ‘cause they absolutely hated these women. They completely disrupted the way prostitution worked. And we’ll go into why this transformation happened. And I think it’s important to keep this in mind when we live in a world today and people say dating markets are no longer functioning, and they act like something that has existed since the beginning of time just collapsed all of a sudden.

Instead of something that’s existed for less than a century collapsed, and what we should do is go back to older mechanisms of dating, like arranged marriage and dating markets like the season, which we are attempting to rebuild. So fun stuff here. Let’s go right into it. So what alerted me to this is the RFab dev, like the only other human who works on it other than Simone and I Bruno reached out with this concept where he wanted us to go into the history of dating.

Specifically the claim that dating came from prostitution or was even frowned on by prostitutes. Specifically because it took business from them And it goes on. The term dating did emerge from prostitution and so did the general practice in the early 20th century. Charity girls were deemed competitors who undercut the wages of prostitutes.

Basically, easy girls who weren’t formal prostitutes figured out that they could blur the lines by getting dinners or so on paid for. Now, what’s really fascinating is the invention of dating as we understand it and think of it as like this wholesome 1950s practice today would have in its time been seen as extremely or eerily parallel to OnlyFansing today E.g.,

getting m- multiple men to pay for stuff for you while being an informal sex worker. I- i- in just a new way using new technologies.

[00:03:48] Simone Collins: I guess that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. People sort of, like, being angry because someone’s coming in and undercutting them professionally. When they’re like, “What? I work for this,” and then there’s a bunch of tourists who [00:04:00] don’t actually need the money but just want a free dinner.

[00:04:02] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay And who are like, “Well, I didn’t know I could just put nudes of myself online and people-” “... would give me money. Let’s, let’s do this.”

[00:04:08] Simone Collins: Oh, no.

[00:04:10] Malcolm Collins: I hear this one theory that OnlyFans was, like, predominantly paid for by dads to see their daughter’s friends. And I was like, “That is telling on yourself, buddy.”

[00:04:23] Simone Collins: That... Mm. Mm.

[00:04:25] Malcolm Collins: But maybe. I mean, I’ve, I’ve seen the movie, You still haven’t seen it. What, what’s it called? Beauty, beauty something. Oh.

[00:04:31] Simone Collins: American Beauty?

[00:04:32] Malcolm Collins: American Beauty, yeah.

[00:04:34] Simone Collins: Seems depressing. I don’t like depressing movies.

[00:04:36] Malcolm Collins: It’s not that depressing-

[00:04:39] Simone Collins: Mm ...

[00:04:40] Malcolm Collins: if I’m gonna be honest. Mostly because all of the characters are so pathetic and unlikable- Girl,

[00:04:45] Simone Collins: that sounds-

that you

[00:04:45] Malcolm Collins: don’t really feel bad for them.

[00:04:47] Simone Collins: I don’t wanna watch something about pathetic, unlikel- I’m, I’m really struggling- It’s, it’s a movie about- ... with TV and movies right now ... the birth of the urban

[00:04:52] Malcolm Collins: monoculture, if you, if you wanna call it anything.

[00:04:55] Simone Collins: Why would I want to watch that?

[00:04:56] Malcolm Collins: And how it destroys people’s lives.

[00:04:58] Simone Collins: I wanna watch attractive, competent people who are good at their jobs. Is this so hard to do? Is this so difficult?

[00:05:05] Malcolm Collins: But to continue here. Modern people don’t fully realize, but paying for a date isn’t providing, it’s confirmation that you can provide. Mm. It isn’t trad, it’s low-grade prostitution and always has been.

Dating is paying for companionship with sex as an unspoken bonus. The old criticism that men would expect sex if they took out a woman was fair, but it ignores the truth that the reason men expected this wasn’t because they were jerks or sexist, but because that is what dating was about. What’s really fun is, so when I dove into this, and, and this is one of these topics where I’m just not gonna be able to read all the primary sources I wanted to read on this, ‘cause there was just so much evidence on this.

But there was one academic research that cited a guy from the 1920s, I think it was, like, 1925, talking about how he paid, like, $1.50 for a girl, and she didn’t even let him do any heavy petting. Oh, dear. And that was the expectation, and he was quite upset about this

[00:06:08] Simone Collins: Huh, $1.50

[00:06:11] Malcolm Collins: That is how it went back then. But basically all of this is confirmed, and it’s dramatically worse than you think, exactly like yesterday when somebody reached out to you.

Today, we treat long-term dating as a precursor to marriage, but it’s not. The difference is in the commitment. If two people act as fully committed, then they’re married regardless of paperwork. Modern dating, though, is long-term persistent companionship without commitment. It’s harsh, but long-term low-commitment dating is just prostitution, always has been.

I’d agree with this. If you treat dating in the conventional format, it’s very unlikely to lead to marriage. If you look at the way that Simone and I dated I sat her down first date, what’d I say?

[00:06:51] Simone Collins: Not looking to date. I’m looking to find a wife. That is what you said. Yeah. You really, I guess, weren’t dating.

You were wife hunting.

[00:06:59] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

[00:07:01] Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. Yeah.

[00:07:05] Malcolm Collins: Mm-hmm. And it meant that everything was structured very differently.

[00:07:08] Simone Collins: It did.

[00:07:09] Malcolm Collins: And the way you thought about every step was very different because it was, we are waiting to see if you clear being good enough to be a wife for me. Mm-hmm.

[00:07:19] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:07:20] Malcolm Collins: But let’s dig in In the social context of dating this is by the way Wikipedia I am reading, lefty coded Wikipedia- Okay

brainwashed Wikipedia here. Dating, treating is the practice of com- providing companionship and intimate activity in exchange for entertainment, outing, gifts, and other items of monetary value. The activity was prevalent in large areas of the United States from the 1890s to the 1940s, and was commonly engaged in by young working class women.

As treating became more widespread, the activity acquired the label charity, and young women who engaged in the more risque [00:08:00] aspects of the practice often became called charity girls. Although some reformers in the early 20th century equated treating with prostitution, the young women who engaged in the activity strongly rejected this view and drew strict distinctions between the two, as women still do.

Doesn’t mean they are different, it just means they draw distinctions between the two. Oh, no. In the same way for Mormons, butt smex isn’t smex because it’s in the butt. And everyone else in the world is like, “That’s still smex.” Right. As social dating between the sexes became more standard in the 1920s, treating began to blend in with the system of dating by the 1940s.

No, we just stopped treating it as a social taboo is what happened. The specific language of treating largely disappeared. This was by the 1940s. So when you see those sweet dating scenes in those 1950 Leave it to Beaver or whatever, that had only become normalized 10 years before those scenes took place, and only had begun to become thought of as something other than prostitution 10 years before those scenes took place

[00:09:14] Simone Collins: That’s really crazy. I mean, ‘cause I, I, I don’t know, I thought it was more traditional than that. Well, both because I saw all those instructional videos on dating from the 1950s and ‘60s. Yeah. But then also because I guess I never really thought through the realities of the London season, because in the Regency Era, there was what you could think of as a dating culture, because a certain elite class of society would converge in London and then have this series of events where everyone would be getting together.

But it’s actually really not. It’s not two people getting together for a private meeting.

[00:09:50] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

[00:09:51] Simone Collins: It was families hosting balls, where a bunch of people would come and be in a room together, super, super highly supervised, and then women of marriageable age would a- wait for men to come visit them at their houses- Exactly

with, with their families around In their,

[00:10:08] Malcolm Collins: in their living room with their families around. Yeah. And most of the communication happened via letter.

[00:10:13] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. Yeah, if, if anything was private, it was in a letter. That’s... Wow, I, I just, it never occurred to me that this idea of one-on-one male-female romantic meetings really didn’t exist until the ‘50s.

And I guess that’s because in the ‘50s it would seem too creepy- ... to do cu- like, arranged marriage. But at the same time- I don’t know, the communities had gotten too big for just people to marry whoever was at church. What, what do you think?

[00:10:50] Malcolm Collins: No, no, no. I, I, I think that this has all specifically come down of the evolving urban monoculture in its earliest stages, ‘cause that’s really when the urban monoculture began to evolve with this idea of, “But I want to hook up with women, and if I don’t do this, I don’t get to hook up with women.”

And as soon as a woman began to engage in charity girl culture, men outside of charity girl culture are going to have a harder time hooking up with her or are going to see her as worthless. But more and more women realize they can hook up with men who are out of their range for periods by engaging in charity girl culture.

[00:11:28] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:11:30] Malcolm Collins: This was the beginning of the, you know, 20% of men get 80% of women category.

[00:11:36] Simone Collins: So you’re arguing, similar to demographic collapse, and everyone’s like, “Oh, it was all caused by phones and social media,” and you’re like, “Look, this started with the Industrial Revolution.” You’re kind of saying something similar- Mm-hmm

with the laziate problem of, of dating, the, the broken dating markets. You’re like, “No, it began as soon as dating existed.”

[00:11:56] Malcolm Collins: And the 19 flappers. It wasn’t the [00:12:00] smartphones. Well, really the 1920s those women started doing this. But everyone- Yeah ... understood it was a bad idea then.

[00:12:03] Simone Collins: Oh, the flapper era. Yeah, everyone knew that flappers were loose girls.

Anyway, but yeah, then I guess it became socially

[00:12:09] Malcolm Collins: acceptable. Disgusting flappers. We will rebuild society, Simone, you and me alone with the force of sheer willpower- ... until we build something that works to replace this nonsense.

[00:12:21] Simone Collins: All of it. All of it.

[00:12:23] Malcolm Collins: We will replace you. That’s the family motto.

[00:12:28] Simone Collins: Framed in our sunroom.

Great.

[00:12:31] Malcolm Collins: Gotta tell the kids.

[00:12:33] Simone Collins: True.

[00:12:33] Malcolm Collins: We really gotta w- wanna get the other one, repeated blunt force, framed somewhere in a live, laugh, love. I would

[00:12:37] Simone Collins: really like that. Yes. Let, let’s just do it. Oh, you’re right.

[00:12:39] Malcolm Collins: I’ll make a note.

[00:12:40] Simone Collins: Yeah. Thank you. Just send me an email and I’ll I’ll get it done. We’ll just order it from the same guy.

We should make merch someday.

[00:12:49] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay, so- We will replace you signs ... I mean, but we have RFab. RFab’s kind of like our merch.

[00:12:53] Simone Collins: Yeah, but you can’t buy a stupid live, laugh, love picture frame that says, “We will replace you.” But whatever.

[00:13:01] Malcolm Collins: All right. So let’s get into the etymology and usage as determined by Wikipedia.

Yeah. The word treating began as a political term with the practice of providing, understood as a means to influence people and gain benefits. In modern usage, it’s generally defined as the act of providing food, drink, or entertainment to an individual or group at free of charge. The word’s use as a verb in a social context is believed to have originated in the male sphere of saloons when individuals would treat each other with another round of drinks.

Yeah,

[00:13:28] Simone Collins: my treat.

[00:13:28] Malcolm Collins: Arou- yeah. Around the turn of the 19th century, young working class women who were seeking language for their interactions and bartering with young men adopted the word. Similar to the activity in a saloon, the practice of to treat evolved to mean providing of something by a man to a woman, the woman being the recipient of a, quote-unquote, “treat.”

And I think one thing that we can do immediately in terms of a cultural difference is to begin to stigmatize women expecting men to pay for dates for them.

[00:14:01] Simone Collins: Absolutely. Dates should always be 50/50. Or better

[00:14:04] Malcolm Collins: yet, free. You always went 50/50 with me, or you always asked to at least. I often insisted on paying because I saw it as traditional.

[00:14:10] Simone Collins: You often insisted as the gentleman. Yeah, you paid for our very first dinner even. Yeah. You, you almost always insisted. But

[00:14:14] Malcolm Collins: I think treating it as non-traditional is really important. Being like, “No, traditionally this would be thought of as you being a prostitute. And so I want to protect your dignity within the techno-puritan community.”

[00:14:26] Simone Collins: Right. “

[00:14:26] Malcolm Collins: As such, I will not pay for you because that would mean that everyone would see you as a prostitute going forward.”

[00:14:33] Simone Collins: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You don’t want there to be any insinuation of impropriety, and if there is... And, and also I think it’s, it’s important to teach kids that every exchange, y- you- there is no such thing as a free lunch.

If someone is giving you something, they want something. And it could just be, you know, the delight of seeing you grateful a, for a gift or something. But if it, if it is a romantic context meal and they are paying for it- Mm-hmm ... they are expecting something. And it... I, I wish that people were more explicit with me about that when I was younger

[00:15:06] Malcolm Collins: You are such a, a sweet person.

B- Too autistic sometimes I’m glad I’m here to protect you, because you, you need somebody to protect you from the world. Your autismal view of reality, the tism really makes you like a little lamb wandering out into- ... a sea of wolves.

[00:15:23] Simone Collins: Not understanding. Look, the more of us there are, the closer we’ll just get to a sustainable wonderful society that makes sense where everyone just says what they think- The tisems?

and feel. Yes.

[00:15:33] Malcolm Collins: Well, you gotta breed the army.

[00:15:35] Simone Collins: Look, do you understand how much better everything would be if people didn’t... It’s, it’s like the, what were the, who were those people in Galaxy Quest who were shocked by this concept of lying, and they, like, whispered amongst each other-

[00:15:47] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I remember those aliens

“This heat, lies.” That’s you. That is 100% Simone.

[00:15:51] Simone Collins: Yes. And then they, like, don’t understand it, but they understand that it happens, but they never see it, and it’s really hard.

[00:15:57] Speaker 9: . My name is Jason Nesmith. I am a a- [00:16:00] actor. We’re all actors. He doesn’t understand. Explain as you would a child

We lied.

[00:16:18] Simone Collins: I

[00:16:19] Malcolm Collins: love that our kids have your radical honesty but are still, like, very rough people. Yes. I was recently watching the Kidnap the Sandy Claws song with the little trick-or-treat kids- Oh my God

from the N- Nightmare Before Christmas. Yes. And I realized the way those three interact is the way our kids interact.

I wanna do it. Let’s draw straws. Jack said we should work together. Three of a kind

[00:16:42] Malcolm Collins: Like, very much teamwork, but also constantly, like, ragging on each other and being quite rough with each other.

[00:16:50] Simone Collins: 100%, yeah. And just the way Titan always attacks from above. She’s so little.

Yeah. But when she hits you, it’ll be from above somehow.

[00:16:59] Malcolm Collins: All right, let’s, let’s go over the origin of this.

[00:17:01] Simone Collins: Let’s.

[00:17:02] Malcolm Collins: This is fascinating. Treating came about with the birth of leisure time in the late 19th century. Hmm. It emerged about the same time as cheap amusements in cities gave working class men and women opportunities to enjoy new aspects of city life away from cramped tenements and noisy oppressive workplaces.

Hmm. For young women, the issue was how to afford the new entertainments, and one solution which materialized was treating. In the late 19th century, inexpensive entertainment venues such as public dance halls, amusement parks, and Nickelodeon movie theaters emerged and flourished in large American cities.

At the same time, changing social morals allowed more young women who previously had to be escorted in public more freedom to go about or on their own in same-sex groups. Although cheap amusements were a major draw, going out for young working class women still proved difficult due to their low wages, a portion of which- Was more often than not handed over to support the family.

The lack of money issue was dealt with in various ways. Some women refrained from going out altogether or limited going out to special occasions, while others depended on friends or their male counterparts to finance the entertainment pleasures. Inevitably, as more young women regularly went out and found it necessary to depend on males for their entertainment and fun, as such, the practice of treating by young working class women emerged.

So this involves a few things that are worth just helping people understand. First, the idea of, like, entertainment that you could just spend a bit of money on and enjoy with other people really did not emerge until this period. There is a perception that it was always around, and it was not always around.

Really the first major innovation that allowed for this was Britain’s penny trains. So for one day a week, what would happen is the trains would run for a penny, and people would use this to go from their city to the very first, as they began to develop and evolve vacation towns, often beaches and stuff like that.

And this is where you begin to have this idea of, oh, I can pay a little bit, like even as a working class person, and do a recreational activity. Then, as I talked about a, a, a nickelodeon, if you’re not familiar with it, is you, you pay a nickel and you’d see a movie. Basically meant the movie theater of this period.

[00:19:24] Simone Collins: Often preceded by newsreels, so it’s how you also knew what was happening in the world.

[00:19:28] Malcolm Collins: Yes. And you had public dance halls where some of them were truly public, but most of them you paid. And this was very different than, like, the, the dance halls of the, the olden days where it would be, like, arranged by a family and everyone would come and you’d receive your, you know, “Oh, I got my invitation to the ball.”

You didn’t need an invitation to these balls often. You just go and dance. And so, many of these activities... And then amusement parks as well. This is where you have the, like, the original Coney Island began to be developed. Oh, [00:20:00] wow. This is where you had the spin-up of things like freak shows.

This is where you had circuses really began to roll out en masse. The idea of, of, of an activity, right? And the idea of an activity really began to develop because of, do you know, Simone? We’ve talked about it before.

[00:20:20] Simone Collins: The Industrial Revolution? What, what? No, we already talked about- The

[00:20:22] Malcolm Collins: rise of wage labor for the first time.

[00:20:25] Simone Collins: Oh yeah, so the Industrial Revolution. Yeah, the fact that, like, people had these jobs, and you would go to it, and then I guess starting in the early 1900s, you started to get a S- a f- a Saturday, or no, sorry, a Sunday off, and then you would get a Saturday off. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:20:39] Malcolm Collins: and you’d have money. Mm-hmm. And before that just wasn’t the way it worked.

Mm-hmm. All- everyone’s household would be their own business, and you- Yeah ... would naturally reinvest any additional capital into the family business. Of

[00:20:47] Simone Collins: course. Of course.

[00:20:49] Malcolm Collins: But now you had men leaving their families to go work in the city, right? And this didn’t really exist before this, as we’ve often said.

The idea of a nuclear family really didn’t exist until, like, the 1920s because wage labor didn’t exist until the 1920s in, in masses.

Mm.

And women, even when they did work, which, you know, often was incredibly a limited opportunity for them, they earned dramatically less than men. Now, why this isn’t the case today, it was the case then.

So if they wanted to participate in these activities, they genuinely needed men to pay for them or their family to pay for them, and many women coming from working class families asking the family was not realistic. But these working class young men now had free cash, which was something they didn’t have historically.

Now, if you still do this today in a society where men earn the same amount of women, which they do, everybody who is watching this, if you haven’t seen people debunk the pay gap myth, I don’t know where you’ve been on the internet since the last 20 years. Like, that there’s still people I’ve heard sometimes say this, and I’m like, “What are you talking about?”

Oh,

[00:21:54] Simone Collins: no, anyone who’s progressive is gonna say, especially progressive and, and females are just gonna

[00:21:59] Malcolm Collins: keep saying it. Young women earn more than young men now.

[00:22:02] Simone Collins: Look, it doesn’t matter. They’re s- going, they’ll, they are still going to say it. It doesn’t matter.

[00:22:06] Malcolm Collins: They’re just brainwashed. They don’t care what’s true.

They just

[00:22:11] Simone Collins: wanna say the thing. Well, and it’s probably going to become increasingly less of a pay gap as fewer women have children because that was the largest driver of the pay gap, because women were just choosing lower paying but more flexible jobs as they entered parenthood. But if girls just relinquish parenthood at increasingly higher rates, we are gonna see an even lower, like, actual pay gap when you don’t adjust for that choice.

[00:22:33] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The the practice of treating ranged from the innocent bartered exchange to more scandalous. It was seen as a harmless activity when conducted between a steady couple, and more risque when performed on a casual basis.

Hmm.

Often, the treating exchange was a tacit understanding with nuanced communication.

However, even with little communication, young women were understood that they were indebted to a certain extent to the men who treated. Like any interaction between a couple, whether tacit or not, sometimes it went smoothly with each party pleased with the outcomes, and other times it did not.

Occasionally, because men were sometimes tricked by women who skipped out after being provided a meal or an evening out, the exchange was more direct. For example di- a man asking directly what he would get in return. Unlike prostitution, in the treating exchange, there was no guarantee that the man would get what he wanted.

Young women who wanted more from the exchange, clothes, shoes, jewelry, or payment of bills... Note this even began to develop all the way back then.

[00:23:35] Simone Collins: Payment of bills?

[00:23:37] Malcolm Collins: Did you not know that a lot of, in, in like the Black women community this is super common? Then

[00:23:41] Simone Collins: you’re a kept woman. That doesn’t, you’re not...

[00:23:44] Malcolm Collins: What, this is common in dating culture today if you’re not dating white people. I have seen Latina women expect this. I have seen Black women expect this in TikToks and stuff like this. Like, the, the expectation goes like this. I’ll explain how they argue it.

[00:23:58] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:23:59] Malcolm Collins: They say, “Do [00:24:00] you know how much I spend doing my hair?

Do you know how much I spend on my mails, my nails? Do you know how much I spend on my makeup?”

[00:24:06] Simone Collins: Dudes don’t care about that.

[00:24:08] Malcolm Collins: No, men don’t, but they believe that they’re owed for it.

[00:24:14] Simone Collins: Why don’t they just say, “Maybe don’t do that anymore”?

[00:24:17] Malcolm Collins: I’m sure a lot of men do, but then the women stop dating them

[00:24:24] Simone Collins: They should probably be cucking them Because

[00:24:24] Malcolm Collins: there’s other men in these minority communities who will pay for this nonsense.

[00:24:28] Simone Collins: That’s, you, you know what? Men need to go on a strike. They need to they need to go on a pay strike.

[00:24:33] Malcolm Collins: I, I, I will- Don’t do this ... say that what makes Simone shocked about this is if you are a middle upper class or upper class white person in America, at least within our generation, nobody...

If you’re, like, shocked by this, that, that I would say that, like, this is a weird thing to do, nobody does that. Nobody does that. If a woman asked me to pay for her bills, I would... And I remember once a woman did, but she called herself a sort of prostitute when she said it, right? Like, she understood that in our culture, in American white culture, that’s seen as prostitution, to ask a man to pay for your bills.

[00:25:10] Simone Collins: Was this in college? When wa- when did this happen to you?

[00:25:12] Malcolm Collins: This was after college. It was a girl I met on OkCupid.

[00:25:16] Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. What did you say to her? Was that the end of your-

[00:25:22] Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. That was the last time I dated her ... liaison? I was like, “I don’t- Okay ... I don’t, I’m not really interested in this.” But I appreciate that she was really upfront about it.

[00:25:27] Simone Collins: No, the upfront, yeah. No, I mean, that’s, that’s really clear. I mean, as I’m thinking about this more in the context of the, like, dating videos that were presumably played in middle schools and high schools in American institutions in the ‘50s, the, the kind of dating that was described there was more like play dating.

That, you know, it was you know, you, you would be going just out for fun, typically in group settings, public places, with a young man from your school, but it was only considered serious if you were going steady. And it was fully understood that you would not be having sex. That, w- like, it was super clear.

Mm-hmm. Th- this is, so I guess it was kind of understood that- Yeah,

[00:26:09] Malcolm Collins: but, but even in the 1950s videos, I remember them telling you to, like, pay for the girl’s lunch or dinner.

[00:26:14] Simone Collins: Yeah. No, that, that is true. Yeah. Men were, were expected to pay, which is interesting.

[00:26:21] Malcolm Collins: And if you go to the 1920s to continue with this, how was that seen?

Hmm. Treating was predominantly practiced by young working class women. It was seldom taken up by young women of middle class or upper class means, as members of those classes generally could afford their own entertainment. Right. So you see, this was seen as a low class thing to do the, very exclusively.

[00:26:38] Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, ‘cause I guess, yeah, if you are a wealthy woman of means, it would be kind of pathetic for you to let someone else- Yeah,

[00:26:48] Malcolm Collins: To have your family not pay for you, right?

[00:26:49] Simone Collins: Wow. Yeah. Hmm.

[00:26:51] Malcolm Collins: The activity was largely confined to large urban areas of the United States, as cities contained with entertainment val- venues and offers, as well as a degree of anonymity against prying family members and watchful neighbors.

Treating differed from gold digging in that there was mainly a dating practice utilized to enjoy the entertainments and pleasures of city life, and to acquire perhaps some desired personal items. To be sure, some women took charity a step further, but finding a wealthy man to marry or becoming a mistress was generally not the goal of the treating exchange.

[00:27:27] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:27:28] Malcolm Collins: Now, treating this as a societal problem. As the practice of treating by young women became more and more widely known, it attracted the attention of reformers and vice squads who were alarmed by the activity. I was reading, and me, like military bases, they explicitly had patrols for women who were doing this.

It was considered-

[00:27:46] Simone Collins: Really?

[00:27:47] Malcolm Collins: Yes. I

[00:27:48] Simone Collins: mean, it sounds kind of like the patrols that you’ll see in a super orthodox Jewish community as well, that’ll kind of police dress codes and stuff.

[00:27:55] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. N- n- nothing less than outright prostitution. [00:28:00] Entertainment venues such as dance halls, where young men and women interacted, came under close scrutiny.

Hmm. The taxi dance halls, where the young women hostesses could be danced with for a modest price per dance, usually 10 cents-

[00:28:12] Simone Collins: Oh ...

[00:28:13] Malcolm Collins: drew the particular ire of reformers and were shut down.

[00:28:16] Simone Collins: That sounds like a host club. Hold on. That is, that is like a proto-host club. What is going on?

[00:28:20] Malcolm Collins: I need to know more about this.

[00:28:21] Simone Collins: Yes.

[00:28:22] Malcolm Collins: We’re going to the Wikipedia game for a taxi dancer.

[00:28:24] Simone Collins: Yes.

[00:28:25] Malcolm Collins: Okay.

[00:28:25] Simone Collins: Taxi dancer. I’ve never heard of this before. But okay, so it’s like you rent a taxi, you’re renting a dancer, and that’s why they called them taxi dancers? Yes. Okay.

[00:28:35] Malcolm Collins: Hmm. A taxi dancer is a dance, a paid dance partner in ballroom dance. The taxi dancers work sometimes for money, but not always, on a dance-by-dance basis.

When taxi dancing first appeared in taxi dance halls in the early 20th century in the United States, male patrons typically brought dance tickets for a small sum each. When a patron presented a ticket to a chosen dancer, she danced with him for the length of the song. She earned a commission on every dance ticket she received.

Though taxi dancing was for, for the most part disappeared in the United States, it’s still practiced in some other countries.

[00:29:10] Simone Collins: It’s called a strip club

[00:29:12] Malcolm Collins: It has its origins in the Barbary Coast District of San Francisco, which evolved from the California Gold Rush of 1849. Oh. In its heyday on the Barbary Coast, it was an economically thriving district inhabited by mostly men who, who...

frequented by gold prospectors and sailors from around the world. The district created a unique form of dance hall called the Barbary Coast Dance Hall known as the 49ers Dance Hall, in which Barbary Coast Dance Hall female employees danced with male patrons and earned their living from commissions paid for the, the drinks they would encourage their male partners to buy.

So exactly like a host club. It was about-

[00:29:48] Simone Collins: It was a host club. Oh my God. We did it first. Yes. Okay. That’s crazy. It makes sense, of course. In, in communities like, I’m sure mining communities and others, if you don’t wanna go all full brothel, something like this. It’s also more affordable to pay for a dance than to pay for more than that.

[00:30:09] Malcolm Collins: Okay, so here’s what it felt like to do. Okay. So you’d go and you’d buy a collection of tickets, right? Mm-hmm. And in the hall, the taxi dancers were usually gathered together behind a waist-high rope or rail barricade on one side in the corner of the room- Oh ... and as such, were not permitted to freely mingle with the patrons.

Because the male patron selected his dance partner, the dancers had to appeal to him for their quar- from their quarantined position. These are like, like, like

[00:30:35] Simone Collins: cattle This produced a

[00:30:36] Malcolm Collins: competitive... Like cattle, like a competitive situation, and on slow nights, which were not uncommon, the taxi dancers often cooed or coaxed to draw attention in their direction because they got commissions.

[00:30:47] Simone Collins: Oh.

[00:30:48] Malcolm Collins: In time, and with more experience, a dancer usually developed some sort of distinctiveness or mannerisms in their dress or personality to attract a male patron. Those who did not were often not successful. Once selected, yeah, they’d be like the ditzy one or the aggressive one.

[00:31:02] Simone Collins: Yeah, or the yandere one or the-

[00:31:05] Malcolm Collins: Yeah

[00:31:05] Simone Collins: aloof one. And yeah, okay, okay, okay. Hmm.

[00:31:09] Malcolm Collins: Once selected, the taxi dancer tried to build a rapport with her patron so he stayed with her dance after dance. Successful- Host club. Taxi dancers usually had a few patrons who came to the hall solely to dance with them- Mm-hmm ... for long periods.

[00:31:23] Simone Collins: Host club.

[00:31:24] Malcolm Collins: In some of the less reputable establishments, the dancing at times was particularly close.

The dancer used her thighs to make the partner erect and encouraged to continue, e- e- even.

[00:31:37] Simone Collins: Well, okay, so they’re taking it a little far.

[00:31:41] Malcolm Collins: That’s a fascinating practice

TIL, right?

[00:31:46] Simone Collins: That’s

[00:31:46] Malcolm Collins: crazy So patrons who tired of dancing but wished to continue with the dance partner usually could do so. A selection in the dance hall with tables, chairs was reserved for this purpose. It was called talk time, [00:32:00] although other terms were used. In 1939, , at the Honey Lane Danceland in Times Square, the free to sit and chat with a dancer was $6 an hour, a princely sum for the time.

At Honeymoon, although the dancer and patron were able to sit side by side, a low fence-like structure separated them due to public regulations. It was not uncommon for taxi dancers to date patrons they had met in the dance halls, and this was generally acquiesced by management

[00:32:31] Simone Collins: Hmm Hmm. I don’t know about this Malcolm, but-

[00:32:41] Malcolm Collins: That is interesting.

[00:32:44] Simone Collins: I had no idea. Why has no one mentioned this before? This is so interesting.

[00:32:48] Malcolm Collins: The sociological study. Oh my God. So the sociological study goes over the, the language that they use, like the slang that they use. So here’s some fun ones, okay? They

[00:32:57] Simone Collins: had slang. Okay.

[00:33:00] Malcolm Collins: A black and tan, a colored and white cabaret, buying the groceries, living in a clandestine relationship.

Class, the term used by Filipinos to denote taxi dance halls. Fish, a man whom the girls can easily- I’m going to class ... exploit for personal gain. Fruit, an easy mark. Hot stuff, stolen goods. Lineup, the immorality engaged in by men and a girl. Make, to secure a date with. Mark, a person who is gullible.

Money chaser, a man interested in taxi dancers or quiet girls. Oh,

sorry. Monkey chaser.

[00:33:36] Simone Collins: Oh.

[00:33:36] Malcolm Collins: Monkey shows, burlesque shows by chorus girls. A nickel hopper, a taxi dancer. A nickel hopper.

[00:33:44] Simone Collins: Nickel hoppers. Dancing for a nickel. That’s great. A nickel hopper.

[00:33:48] Malcolm Collins: On the ebony. This is when you dated outside your race with taxi dancers.

[00:33:52] Simone Collins: Oh. Oh my goodness

[00:33:56] Malcolm Collins: Picking up, securing after a dance engagement with a taxi dancer.

A punk, a n- n- a noviate or uninitiated youth or girl usually referring to an unsophisticated taxi dancer.

[00:34:08] Simone Collins: Hmm. One who doesn’t have her whole spiel yet.

[00:34:13] Malcolm Collins: That is, that is wild. I’m glad we went over that.

[00:34:16] Simone Collins: That is so crazy. I am delighted, yes. Wonderful.

[00:34:20] Malcolm Collins: Okay, okay, okay. So, the next best place I found an article on this, ‘cause I found, like, 30 different articles on this.

And let’s go to the shop girl. This is from a New York Post article on this.

[00:34:33] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:34:35] Malcolm Collins: We- th- this- it, it, it goes to the, the shop girl here, which is sort of going to the next phase of this. When, while dating finally became acceptable, it wasn’t exactly liberating for women. If the American dream for men was to work and become a success, the equivalent for women was to get a good job and marry a rich boss.

Frances Donovan, a University of Chicago trained sociologist who taught at Camelot High School on the city’s South Side in the 1920s, interviewed senior girls about their plans after graduation. Before I go further, that’s what you did, Simone. You got a good job and married your boss. That’s what every woman needs to do.

[00:35:11] Simone Collins: There you go.

[00:35:13] Malcolm Collins: I mean, we started the company together, but obviously because women are naturally subservient, you started in a subservient role

I’m only saying what we all know. I mean, come on.

[00:35:24] Simone Collins: It’s just the truth. It’s just the truth.

[00:35:28] Malcolm Collins: Weigler writes, “’I would like to be a stenographer,’ one wrote. ‘I’m going to be an executive secretary and marry the boss,’ another wrote. The other alternative was for women to take jobs in high-class department stores where rich men were likely to shop.

These women were known as shop girls.” Oh, fascinating, and I love the idea of becoming a secretary specifically to hook up with whoever hires you, right? Like, when you are going for your job interviews, you’re literally thinking, “Do I wanna have sex with this man?”[00:36:00]

That is wild. And also the idea of, “Well, how do I find a rich man? I’ll go to work at an upper class store.” And I think it’s, this is why there was that really hard for women to get jobs at upper class stores for a period.

[00:36:14] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:36:14] Malcolm Collins: Because women went there to hook up.

[00:36:16] Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah, it was this competitive place, and also probably, like, women would basically work for free just to get the opportunity, the access.

[00:36:24] Malcolm Collins: And became shop girls, as they were called. Oh

[00:36:26] Simone Collins: my goodness.

[00:36:27] Malcolm Collins: Donovan spent two summers working at a department store to research a book, and later reported she knew of several marriages and heard of a great many more where the husband was far above the wife as measured by economic scale. Magazines began, are, are running articles such as How Shop Girls Win Rich Husbands.

As an in-house newsletter for Macy’s employees in New York included a gossip column that tracked these courtships.

[00:36:53] Simone Collins: They... Oh, they were just that explicit about it. They’re like, “Okay, girls.”

[00:36:58] Malcolm Collins: This

[00:36:58] Simone Collins: is what we’re here for. “Go get rich men.” Wow. I mean, I guess it would be in their favor because it attracted very appealing young women to work there, and they probably worked at under market wages, so that’s great.

[00:37:13] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Here’s a quote from one of the this, this internal magazine. I love it’s their internal company newsletter. Like, PR is like, “This makes it...” W- w- HR is like, “This makes us look great. This’ll help with retention.” So an example of what was written in it is, “Have you noticed a gentleman wearing spats stopping at Miss Holland’s counter every day, leaving spray of Lily of the Valley?

Best of luck, Ide.”

[00:37:41] Simone Collins: Adorable. Aw.

[00:37:43] Malcolm Collins: In order to attract rich men, shop girls were caught by the irony of needing to buy expensive items they sold- Hmm ... or needing to buy the expensive items they sold. In an odd way, the consumerist market marketed a form of progress. “In an earlier era, a girl of humble origins could not hope to look the, like the wife or daughter of a millionaire,” Weigel wrote.

“But a job in a department store or a laundry gave anyone opportunities to become well-versed in the science of wealth.” To that end, shop girls studied the well-to-do female customers seeking to imitate their look, which led to the business world to pronounce this a new type of consumer who sought little but to impress.

The cosmetics industry exploded in the 1920s, writes, writes, “Previously only prostitutes and actresses painted.” Victorians had viewed natural outla- outer beauty as a sign of clean living, but around 1900 and more and more women were starting to apply cosmetics. By 1912, the Baltimore Sun reported that, “Even respectable society women are seen on our streets as fashionable promenade with painted faces.”

[00:38:50] Octavian Collins: Wow.

[00:38:51] Malcolm Collins: To counter society negative expectations with painted faces, the cosmetics industry invented a new term: makeup. Oh, so it was called face painting before, and then it became makeup.

[00:39:01] Simone Collins: I really wanna bring back painting faces. That’s, ‘cause it is. It’s, it, I mean, it, it just is.

[00:39:08] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They, they basically tried to make it sound virtuous.

By making yourself up, you showed that you valued your femininity, right?

[00:39:14] Simone Collins: Hmm. Yeah. But no, y- you’d be painting, especially these days.

[00:39:21] Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely.

[00:39:21] Simone Collins: It’s intense. Yeah. This is a fine art.

[00:39:23] Malcolm Collins: This is, So again, other things we should shame people for.

[00:39:28] Simone Collins: Wearing makeup. It has its place. For instance. It has its place.

Even, even in w- we’ll say sort of the remaining w- noble classes of modern day, like the British royal family, you’re not s- to s- for example, supposed to paint your nails any color than, like, ballerina pink. So they’re basically supposed to look to look manicured, but you can’t, like, do any flashy nail colors.

But you should probably maintain manicured nails. But Queen [00:40:00] Elizabeth II always chose to wear very bright lipstick because it made her more photographable, and she understood that, like, being distinct in photos was important. So I think there’s a line to be drawn but yeah, it’s tough. Yes. Look, it would be really tough for young women- Mm

to not do makeup now that filters m- make them realize what they could look like.

[00:40:26] Malcolm Collins: Filters are providing the new again, we’re going through a similar transition right now.

[00:40:32] Simone Collins: What do you mean?

[00:40:33] Malcolm Collins: Well, it’s not just that you have OnlyFans mirroring the, the invention of dating, but you have filters mirroring the invention of makeup.

[00:40:44] Simone Collins: Oh.

[00:40:45] Malcolm Collins: The idea of Photoshopping yourself used to be seen as an incredibly trashy thing to do.

[00:40:51] Simone Collins: That’s true. Oh, my goodness. Right. I hadn’t thought about that.

[00:40:55] Malcolm Collins: This was in our lifetime, Simone.

[00:40:58] Simone Collins: Yeah, Photoshop disasters were an institution now. All

[00:41:01] Malcolm Collins: right. Now we’re gonna study, not discuss, study the it girl.

[00:41:07] Simone Collins: Oh. W- in the context of dating?

[00:41:10] Malcolm Collins: Two other now familiar concepts also sprung up around the time. Previously, people sought to be known by traits that emphasize their morality, such as character and virtue. The concept of personality, which places emphasis on surface traits, had been regarded as negative in reference term of personality disorders.

Starting around the 1920, however, Waggle writes, experts began to grant that healthy individuals had personalities, too. And not every- This is wild, this idea of wanting to be known for, like, a unique personality. This mirrors the invention of the VTuber

[00:41:45] Octavian Collins: Hmm.

[00:41:46] Malcolm Collins: Or even the YouTube star. Look at us, personality.

I’m a, what, what am I? A, a- A

[00:41:53] Simone Collins: taxi girl? A taxi dancer?

[00:41:55] Malcolm Collins: I’m a taxi dancer. You guys pay me to, to do the taxi dance.

[00:41:59] Simone Collins: And to dance.

[00:41:59] Malcolm Collins: The taxi dance with your brain.

[00:42:01] Simone Collins: The tax- oh, God.

[00:42:03] Malcolm Collins: Sign up for our Substack or Patreon to get your taxi dance this weekend.

[00:42:07] Simone Collins: Oh my God.

[00:42:08] Malcolm Collins: And we also have weekend episodes for...

[00:42:10] Simone Collins: I hate you.

I love you so much, but oh my God, no. But yes, the, the, the weekend episodes are really fun. Carry on.

[00:42:20] Malcolm Collins: The concept began popping up in romance literature and articles about dating in the sense that personality was like painting, in a way a woman could make herself up in order to appeal to men. So women began to develop personalities outside of their virtuousness or wholesomeness to appeal to men, and this, you know, eventually ended in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, right?

But this is where it started. Hmm. “In the context of dating, to have a good personality or simply have a personality meant to have charisma,” Wagelle writes. This was to assert whether you were selling handkerchiefs or selling yourself. Island Gwyn, writing for the Cosmopolitan in 1926, referred to personality simply as, quote-unquote, “it,” which was, according to Wagelle, a mysterious kind of animal magnetism.

“With it,” Gwyn wrote, “you win all men if you are a woman.” Oh, it was rizz. “And all women if you are a man.”

[00:43:13] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:43:14] Malcolm Collins: It’s gotten rizz, is what it is.

[00:43:16] Simone Collins: Yes. S- s- another single syllable word.

[00:43:21] Malcolm Collins: Rizz. Gwyn’s article was adapted for a movie starring Clara Brown as a shop girl who has it, and the concept of the-

[00:43:28] Simone Collins: I pictured the clown.

I was like, it? This is not... Okay, shop girl.

[00:43:34] Malcolm Collins: The concept of the it girl was born. Bowes’ it girl of course, sought to marry the boss. In this case, the son of the store’s owner. Oh my cucking God, women of this period ha- were shameless. The notion of

[00:43:48] Simone Collins: it- What, nothing is cha- what do you... Women of that period.

[00:43:50] Malcolm Collins: All women, sorry, awalt.

A Walt

[00:43:56] Simone Collins: Look, if men... Look, men are also hypergamous. [00:44:00] Everyone wants as good as you can get , possibly

[00:44:03] Malcolm Collins: Well, to marry. Women also want as good as they can get for men, while me- men will take anyone. And somehow for men this is, like, a major issue that women are this way. And then some men are like, “I would marry anyone.”

And I’m like, “Well, then you kinda suck.” You know?

[00:44:19] Simone Collins: I, I have never heard a man say that he would marry anyone.

[00:44:21] Malcolm Collins: I’ve never heard a man say that either. Yeah. He would pick- But, you

[00:44:24] Simone Collins: know, me

[00:44:24] Malcolm Collins: hanging out with successful men, so...

[00:44:26] Simone Collins: I... No, I, I genuinely think men, especially these days, are well inoculated to the, the potential hazards of proximity to women.

Well, I’ll

[00:44:37] Malcolm Collins: put a little clip here that will you know, help, help men understand what they should be looking for in a relationship.

[00:44:45] Simone Collins: Hmm?

[00:44:46] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I’ll send it to you. You’ll, you’ll find it funny.

[00:44:48] Speaker 4: I love this tree, and I love this stick, and I love this mole- No, no, no. That’s not how it’s done. He’s

[00:44:53] Speaker 5: made for

[00:44:53] Speaker 3: her.

[00:44:53] Speaker 4: And she’s made for him.

[00:44:55] Speaker 3: That’s the way it’s always been.

And it’s perfect.

[00:44:58] Speaker 5: And it’s pure.

[00:44:59] Speaker 4: That’s the way that all love goes. Like a flower, it grows and grows.

[00:45:03] Speaker 5: And it’s forever. And forever.

[00:45:06] Speaker 3: And now we all worship our king. Our king. Huh? Our king. His name is Malcolm. Our king. He is

[00:45:15] Speaker 5: the king of love.

[00:45:16] Malcolm Collins: It even ends with talking about their king, Malcolm, the King of Love.

[00:45:20] Simone Collins: Oh, my God. Okay, great.

[00:45:23] Malcolm Collins: Right?

[00:45:23] Simone Collins: Fantastic.

Fantastic. I

[00:45:25] Malcolm Collins: do- I, I feel like I’m in a simulation. This has to be a simulation, ‘cause there’s no way that this keeps aligning like this.

[00:45:34] Simone Collins: Uncanny.

[00:45:34] Malcolm Collins: The notion it can be developed led... Sorry. The notion that it can be developed led to the origin of another phenomenon, the dating advice book. Weigel tells of a 1915 New York Times article on a lecture by author Susan Cockcroft, who seized on the trend by writing books like What to Eat and When, and this now remarkable title, Beauty and Duty.

I like that one.

[00:45:59] Simone Collins: Beauty and Duty. “

[00:46:00] Malcolm Collins: Beauty is no longer a vanity. It is a, a, it is use,” Crockett said. “A waitress or a shop girl can be fired at any time simply because someone her boss found prettier than her showed up and asked for a position.” I wish we lived in that world still. As dating rituals changed, moral authorities panicked at every turn.

After petting came into vogue in the 1920s, for example, Weigel cites a Times article from 1922 with the title Mothers Complain That Modern Girls Vamp Their Sons at Petting Parties. “Those evil, evil modern girls,” the article ends.

[00:46:39] Simone Collins: What on earth is a petting party? That sounds horrible. Well- No one would go to a petting party.

That’s... No. Nobody wants that. W-

[00:46:51] Malcolm Collins: i’m looking it up, Simone.

[00:46:53] Simone Collins: Don’t. You really don’t need to. I I think I’m good. I mean, like, the, the greatest fear I have of going to a party is that there may be physical contact of some sort. A party that revolves around physical contact-

[00:47:12] Malcolm Collins: Petting.

[00:47:13] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:47:15] Malcolm Collins: Not good. Actually, I’m, I’m gonna g- I’m going to Grok for this one, ‘cause I want a long answer.

I wanna really gross you out. Oh,

[00:47:20] Simone Collins: great. No. Mm. ‘Cause

[00:47:21] Malcolm Collins: what, what people were doing in the 1920s, probably not that bad compared to what we grew up with in Silicon Valley, but okay.

[00:47:28] Simone Collins: Hopefully it’s just ‘cause they had those really fun tassels on their flapper dresses, and it was just like, “Let’s fondle the tassels.”

[00:47:36] Malcolm Collins: So petting itself was a flexible term, and it meant prolonged kissing. Oh. For others, it included more-

[00:47:42] Simone Collins: That’s not petting, that’s kissing. It’s a kissing part. Can people word correctly

[00:47:47] Malcolm Collins: publicly? For others, it involved more intimate touching. It was a sort of peer-supervised sexual experimentation that both encouraged experimentation and created clear limits.

It, yet lung, bl- young people [00:48:00] explore without the risk of pregnancy, venereal disease, or the social consequences of going all the way. The phrase entered popular use around the 1920s. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described the great current American phenomenon of the get it petting party in his Side of Paradise.

Newspapers soon treated it as a national scandal. Mothers complained that modern girls were vamping with their sons at these events, and authorities sometimes sent deputies out to country lanes looking to break up couples in parked cars. The automobile was central. Parked jalopies on remote roads became rolling bedrooms.

Other regional names include necking parties, mushing parties, fussing parties, spooning, and snuggle pupping. It was extremely common. Contemporary studies found by 1924, roughly 92% of college women had tried petting, and more than 90% of young people at dance young people at dances or in cars admitted to hugging or kissing

[00:49:01] Simone Collins: It’s not even...

Oh, this was before bucket seats. So that explains a lot.

[00:49:08] Malcolm Collins: This was when you had bucket seats, which made it easy to do this.

[00:49:11] Simone Collins: No, no, no. No. Bucket seats are where you can’t scoot across. Oh,

[00:49:16] Malcolm Collins: yeah, yeah. Individual seats. Yeah, yeah. This was before. I’m sorry. This was when you had the one long seat. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Really designed for sex.

[00:49:21] Simone Collins: Yeah. Like in a good old Chevy Malibu. And

[00:49:24] Malcolm Collins: cars

[00:49:24] Simone Collins: were

[00:49:24] Malcolm Collins: much wider, remember.

[00:49:25] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Okay. And they were real bouncy. Do you remember how bouncy they were?

[00:49:32] Malcolm Collins: I haven’t been in one of these cars except for, like, in museums.

[00:49:36] Simone Collins: Oh. They’d be bouncy. They’re like s- There, there were springs involved.

So-

[00:49:41] Malcolm Collins: Well, for a reason.

[00:49:42] Simone Collins: For a re- Yeah. No, I guess teens just sat in those were like, “I can only think of one thing when sitting in this seat, and I’m going to be borrowing the car tonight.” That is disgusting. I do not like this. Dating is bad, and I disapprove of petting, fussing, necking, s- p- puppy- Mushing

m- m- manu- what? Spooning, puppy spooning, double reverse. What

[00:50:10] Malcolm Collins: was it? Snuggle pupping.

[00:50:11] Simone Collins: Snuggle pup. Snuggle pup. No. We do not snuggle- You

[00:50:16] Malcolm Collins: definitely disapprove of snuggle pupping.

[00:50:17] Simone Collins: I really disapprove of snuggle pupping. Oh, my goodness gracious. You are

[00:50:23] Malcolm Collins: such a Puritan woman. I found the perfect wife to- Yeah

found this, this new cultural movement with. We will recreate the London season. This is gonna be awesome.

[00:50:33] Simone Collins: It really is. I, I’m looking forward to it. Yeah. If you’re

[00:50:37] Malcolm Collins: interested

[00:50:37] Simone Collins: in having your kids- Shout-outs to everyone

[00:50:38] Malcolm Collins: on our list ... in our dating network, please reach out to us. I would love to bring them on board.

Another thing that I’d note is do not mourn the collapse of dating markets. They were always degenerate. We have to create something new. We have to create something better.

[00:50:50] Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s, this is a very, like, white-pilled episode in the end, ‘cause they were never meant to be. Dating is disgusting. It’s worse than pros- It really is worse than prostitution.

Because the great thing about prostitution is you have a clear social contract with real value being ex- exchanged. And the problem is that dating is... It doesn’t only undermine those clear social contracts, but it, it intentionally introduces huge, vast swaths of ambiguity where there isn’t strong communication around the exchange that’s being agreed upon for an assignation.

Someone could assume that dinner is going to buy them Snuggle pupping when the other one thinks that it’s going to just, you know, be paid for with a hug or a peck on the cheek. And that is really bad You know, a lot of

[00:51:43] Malcolm Collins: women have developed the idea that they are just owed by the fact of being women, by the fact of showing up at a dinner-

[00:51:50] Simone Collins: Yeah, their, their

[00:51:52] Malcolm Collins: mere company

that’s their gift to the man.

[00:51:53] Simone Collins: Yeah. That them staring blankly at their phone for the majority of the dinner, but allegedly looking good [00:52:00] beneath their caked on contour makeup, their drag queen makeup. They

[00:52:04] Malcolm Collins: don’t even look that good.

[00:52:06] Simone Collins: Well, you really don’t like a, a makeup look so-

[00:52:10] Malcolm Collins: Yeah ...

[00:52:11] Simone Collins: there’s that. Well,

[00:52:13] Malcolm Collins: I love you, Simone.

Sorry.

[00:52:17] Simone Collins: Your alarm- ... this is why you co- you don’t wake up. You, you, you have the most relaxing alarm sounds. Like, this is what people listen to in spas when they’re trying to fall asleep or getting massage. I’m waking up these days. I’m,

[00:52:26] Malcolm Collins: I’m-

[00:52:27] Simone Collins: And you’re like, “I’m gonna set-” I’ve had an easy time- Yeah, I think you’re doing that naturally

[00:52:31] Malcolm Collins: because I have stopped eating, and it’s really helped me wake up early.

[00:52:35] Simone Collins: This, this is a very disturbing trend. I’m gonna thaw out some steak so that you’re gonna have to eat, because then you’re like, “I can’t waste good steak.”

[00:52:43] Malcolm Collins: Good. You get on that. But tonight I’m skipping.

[00:52:47] Simone Collins: Are you serious? I- It’s been how many days?

[00:52:51] Malcolm Collins: It’s been since the miscarriage. I just haven’t been hungry since then

So I’ll be fine. I, I, I just will get through it, and I am emotionally adjusting. Mm-hmm.

I’ll g- I’ll get- I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine Mm-hmm. Ish. Maybe anyway, for our fans I would really like to have you guys,

[00:53:27] Simone Collins: Let’s join the index. Just email us if you wanna be

[00:53:29] Malcolm Collins: on our list Oh, yeah. That or if you want to explore what it would’ve been like to go on a date during this period or to go to one of these parties or to exist within this changing part of world history, this is one of the things that Reality Fabricator, rfab.ai, would be really good for.

That’s true. You can use our story generation tools, even just selecting the 1920s as a date, give it a concept around a story in this. Use the instant story generator if you want it faster. It can create an intro for you that’s going to research the internet to be period-appropriate for you. You want a, a really well-researched piece, you could do the concept expander that even do the research dossier before it starts.

And then you can explore something that as a kid you know, if, if you go back 20 years ago, the technology for this just simply didn’t exist. But today you can live in an immersive textual story of what this would have felt like, and I’m really excited to be able to deliver that technology to you guys, and I hope you have fun with it.

And another fun news is a new version of Rhoads is probably coming out next week, so I’m really excited about that. We’re sorry for the short outage we had when it accidentally fell back to OpenAI that’s been fixed. That’s our base AI that can answer any question, you know, great for discussing these types of topics.

Just really, really excited to be building out new technology and being able to deliver that technology to you guys at a, that, that’s just significantly better than what you’re gonna find on, you know, Janitor AI or you know, FlowGPT or any of the major-- Web Soccer AI, FM. None of them come close to what we’re able to offer you, and I’m, I’m, I’m really proud about that, and I hope that we can continue to improve the experience for you through, you know, bug reports or anything you guys wanna report.

Make, make this really the best thing in the industry. And when- whenever you guys share or talk about or bring other people over, you know, it really helps us. So this means, you know, if, if you do like using the product, when you’re in those Reddits, when you’re in those Discords, and people are discussing, “Hey, I use this for like companion chat.

I use this for AI storytelling.” You know, reference us, be like, “This is where you guys wanna be.” Because that’s you know, capturing the public mind share is, is where you win this. And, and just our advertising campaigns have not been very successful even though the product itself has been growing a lot and the user base has a really high retention rate.

So, we’ve gotta f- we’ve gotta figure out, and, and right now all I can figure out is you guys

[00:55:58] Simone Collins: Thank you for everyone who tried [00:56:00] it out Thank you so much. I really like it. I use it every day. I don’t like playing any sort of games, so I don’t use any of those things. I use- You

[00:56:04] Malcolm Collins: use it for

[00:56:05] Simone Collins: Bible study

Super Stock. I use it for Bible study. Yeah, I made, I made a companion that is a biblical scholar who is an expert in all the different translations and the historical context And you run

[00:56:15] Malcolm Collins: her on one of the, the hardware so you can have her by your bed as you go to sleep.

[00:56:18] Simone Collins: Yeah, so I don’t have, like, a device that I have to, like, open up and turn on.

I just talk to my friend. And then I use Super Stock and Super Search a lot. It has a really good fact checker, and we’re even now recording a podcast on his podcast recording and editing software that has fact check built in. You can replace bad words with, like,

[00:56:40] Malcolm Collins: one click. You could upload a- I think the thing was one of those stupid TikTok songs that would violate vi- content violations.

Remove the song and replace it with your own song for very cheap, for pennies.

[00:56:49] Simone Collins: While still keeping the talking that’s in it, which- Yeah ... is great, ‘cause a lot of YouTubers I watch are like, “Well, I have to silence this whole thing ‘cause copyright,” and they don’t know that RFAB exists, and I should probably just start DM’ing people.

And yeah, anyway, thank you

[00:57:03] Malcolm Collins: everyone who tried it out. That’s actually a good idea. You could use an AI to find people who have complained about this.

[00:57:07] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:07] Malcolm Collins: Cite their complaints and saying, “Why don’t you use RFAB?”

[00:57:10] Simone Collins: I will. I will. I

[00:57:11] Malcolm Collins: just- Give me a few more days of editing- ... ordered a current Gmail ... ‘cause to, to just improve the features a

[00:57:14] Simone Collins: bit.

Make sure it’s super smooth? Okay.

[00:57:16] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But yeah. All right, love you.

[00:57:18] Simone Collins: I love you too. Did you move it up? I started at home,

[00:57:25] Octavian Collins: in, on easiest Look, look, I got the rook. I’m gonna kill the rook. I’m just gonna get my king. I’m just gonna Work down

[00:57:37] Malcolm Collins: Wow.

[00:57:39] Simone Collins: Ta-da

He’s happy

[00:57:45] Speaker 6: P- p- pause I can’t pause. Oh wait, I can. Never mind. P- p-

[00:57:57] Speaker 7: Where are you gonna fly, little bird?

If you only do one thing after watching: check your license and the actual donor registry. Taking the heart off the card is not always enough. Tell the people who would show up at the hospital. Put a revocation in your advance directive.
Not medical or legal advice. Organ transplants save lives. The question is whether the current definition, incentives, and paperwork are honest enough to trust.

Show Notes

The Case of TJ Hoover

SIMONE’S SOURCE: It’s not real, lots of people survive incurable brain death, most famously and most recently TJ Hoover

According to some reports, A person who has actually met a complete, correctly performed formal determination of brain death/death by neurologic criteria (BD/DNC) does not recover.

• By definition, the determination requires permanent loss of function of the brain as a whole, including the brainstem

• A later recovery means the person was not, in fact, brain-dead under the applicable standard, or that the diagnosis/process was incomplete or erroneous.

• THE PROBLEM IS THAT IT DOESN’T SEEM PEOPLE ARE CORRECTLY DIAGNOSING, because TJ Hoover was one of those people.

Anthony Thomas “TJ” Hoover II was hospitalized in Richmond, Kentucky, in October 2021 after a drug overdose and cardiac arrest, according to reporting based on family and former-organ-procurement-worker accounts. He was severely neurologically impaired and entered an organ-donation pathway. His family says they were told he was brain-dead or dead

The reported sequence is alarming:

• While he was being moved toward the operating room, Hoover’s sister said she saw him open his eyes and look around; she was reportedly told this was a reflex.

• During a cardiac catheterization intended to evaluate his heart for potential transplantation, former staff members said Hoover woke or thrashed and was then sedated.

• When he reached the operating room for planned organ recovery, a preservation worker described him as moving, thrashing, and visibly crying. Two physicians reportedly refused to take part, and the organ-recovery surgery was stopped.

• Hoover survived. Reporting describes ongoing impairments in memory, walking, and speech, and says he lives with his sister, who is his legal guardian.

The allegations prompted review by Kentucky authorities and a federal investigation by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), according to NPR’s 2024 reporting

So what on earth happened???

• Did Hoover survive? Yes

• Did family members understand that he was “brain-dead” or “dead”? Yes.

• Was there a completed, valid, documented formal BD/DNC declaration?: Disputed

There are also cases of people recovering from formal brain-death declarations

The strongest published case that can plausibly be described as survival after a formal brain-death declaration involves a baby girl:

• A female infant born at 35 weeks’ gestation suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.

• She was declared brain-dead between approximately 40 and 120 hours after birth.

• The report stated that apparent confounders were absent.

• Instead of deteriorating, she gradually regained neurologic function and was reported healthy at one-year follow-up.

But it’s complicated: Current neurological guidance does not endorse determining brain death in infants born before 37 weeks’ gestation because the neonatal examination and diagnostic evidence have not been sufficiently validated in that population. The 2024 review expressly treats the case as a historical misdiagnosis under standards that should not now be used for that patient.

The 1968 Harvard Paper on Brain Death

SIMONE’S SOURCE:…it is impossible to harvest transplantable organs from an actual dead person

IMPOSSIBLE

Go get the original Harvard 1968 paper on brain death

Their very clear. There will be no public support for killing people for their organs

Therefore, we need a new category of death

To create public support for organ donation

THE PAPER

I looked up this paper, and indeed:

• It was pivotal to modern brain-dead standards

• It explicitly considered organ transplant implications

• It enabled procurement of organs from living people

The Harvard Medical School Ad Hoc Committee’s August 1968 JAMA report, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,” set out clinical criteria for a patient whose brain function was believed to have irreversibly ceased. Its criteria included:

• Complete unresponsiveness

• No spontaneous breathing

• No spontaneous movement

• Absence of reflexes

• A flat EEG as confirmatory evidence

• Repeat testing after 24 hours, with exclusions for confounders such as hypothermia or sedating drugs

It did not use the contemporary statutory formulation “whole-brain death” in the way later laws did, but it was foundational to the modern brain-death framework. Later U.S. law adopted a formulation under which a person may be declared dead after the irreversible cessation of circulatory/respiratory function or all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem.

The report was allegedly meant to respond to two intertwined problems created by intensive-care technology:

• Ventilators could preserve circulation and a heartbeat in patients with catastrophic, irreversible brain injury.

• Doctors and families needed a way to determine when continued life support was no longer appropriate—and when death had occurred—even though the heart had not stopped.

HOWEVER, Organ transplantation was also plainly part of the context. The committee stated that “obsolete criteria” for death could create controversy in transplantation, because organs deteriorate rapidly after circulation stops. Declaring death based on irreversible loss of brain function made it possible to recover organs while oxygenated circulation was still being mechanically maintained

Earlier neurologic descriptions of a state like “brain dead” existed, including the 1959 French description of coma dépassé—a state resembling what would later be called brain death. The 1968 Harvard committee’s distinctive contribution was to move from describing profound, apparently irreversible coma to treating it as a criterion of death in U.S. medical practice and, eventually, law.

The Downstream Consequence of This

• Under prevailing U.S. medical and legal standards, a properly determined brain-dead patient is dead—not a living patient—despite a ventilator-maintained heartbeat, warm skin, and circulation. Brain-death determination is treated as a death determination, not a prognosis or a consent to withdraw care.

• Biologically, such bodies can retain some integrated functions with intensive support: circulation, gas exchange via ventilation, wound healing, hormonal activity, and in rare cases gestation. Those facts are why critics argue that brain death does not always match ordinary intuitions about a dead body.

How “Brain Dead” Patients are Treated Differently if Organ Donors

SIMONE’S SOURCE: Donors are given paralytics

So they don’t move during harvest

They feel everything

Research findings:

• Yes, paralytics (aka neuromuscular blocking drug) are used about 90% of the time

  • Paralytics do NOT provide pain relief or sedation or anesthetization

• No, patients are not always medicated for pain, just for organ preservation and to suppress spinal reflexes and stabilize physiology: Per standard procedure, they are not required to prevent conscious suffering because consciousness and pain perception are considered absent.

  • A review of one center’s cases found that about one-third of brain-dead donors received an opioid, most often fentanyl; about 63% received an inhaled anesthetic such as sevoflurane or isoflurane; and 90% received a neuromuscular blocker.

  • There are no universally binding national or international intraoperative anesthesia guidelines for brain-dead donor recovery, and protocols vary among hospitals and organ-procurement systems. The review specifically notes limited and conflicting outcome evidence.

The Lazarus Sign

SIMONE’S SOURCE: Oh look up the “Lazarus reflex”

This is when the supposedly dead person tries to fight off the surgeon

The Lazarus sign is a pattern of movement sometimes observed in people declared brain-dead who remain on a ventilator. The person may:

• Flex both arms at the elbows.

• Raise their arms upward.

• Bring the hands toward the neck, chin, chest, or endotracheal tube.

• Cross the arms over the chest.

• Occasionally lift or arch the upper body.

The standard explanation is that the movement is generated by neural circuits in the spinal cord below the brainstem, without input from the cerebral cortex or brainstem.

• There is no sound basis to describe it as a conscious defensive act if the brain-death diagnosis was correctly made.

• IF THE DIAGNOSIS WAS CORRECTLY MADE

Because the arms may appear to reach toward the face or tube, people sometimes describe it as “trying to pull out the tube,” “sitting up,” or “fighting the surgeon.” It can be deeply unsettling to see and it deserves a clear explanation before family members witness withdrawal of ventilation or donor surgery.

NOTE: The paper I referenced for some descriptions of this reports on two brain-dead patients who survived for over 100 days after being declared brain dead, who both showed these signs. The paper says organ donation was recommended to both families, but both families refused.

The Apnea Test

SIMONE’S SOURCE: Oh and the apnea test

Where they turn off your ventilator for ten minutes while you’re doped up on paralytics and fentanyl and propofol to “prove” brain death

There is no ethical basis for doing this test because the patient derives no benefit from it and instead can be harmed

In an apnea test, clinicians provide oxygen but suspend mandatory machine breaths long enough for carbon dioxide ​ to rise. They watch continuously for any spontaneous respiratory effort and measure blood gases. If the patient takes even one breath, the test does not support death by neurologic criteria.

• Current U.S. guidance specifically requires that sedative effects and pharmacologic paralysis be excluded—not present—before the test can support a brain-death determination

• Clinicians are supposed to wait for drugs to wear off before running this test

• HOWEVER, we cannot know with certainty that every U.S. hospital—or every clinician in every case—follows the 2023 guidance exactly. The guideline is a national professional standard intended to improve consistency, but it is not itself a real-time enforcement system, and implementation varies by state law, hospital policy, clinician credentialing, and how quickly institutions update older protocols. The guideline’s own authors explicitly acknowledge documented variability in U.S. hospital policies

The Other Activities

SIMONE’S SOURCE: [if] you have agreed to be a donor. They can do all sorts of other sick stuff with you

Transplant a pig kidney and see how long you live

Let residents use you to practice surgery

Checking on this:

• Yes, there have been studies in which genetically modified pig kidneys were connected or transplanted into brain-dead research decedents (see: Human Brain-Dead Recipient Model in Solid Organ Xenotransplantation: A Scoping Review of Technical and Ethical Issues)

• Yes, trainees may participate under supervision, as with other surgical care

• Other things like whole-body donation for anatomy teaching, dissection, etc. and practice surgery should not be presumed permitted; organ donor laws vary from state to state

The Business of Organ Harvesting

SIMONE’S SOURCE: And if you care about health care costs, keep in mind that the main driver of this is the transplants are wildly profitable for hospitals

There is far more money to be made into clearing someone praying dead and harvesting their organs and transplanting them and caring for the transplanties than leaving them in the ICU and giving them time

Findings

To set the scene, broad hospital operating margins are often thin. KFF reported a national average hospital operating margin of 5.2% in 2023, while more recent nonprofit-system reporting found a median 1.5% operating margin in 2024. In that environment, managers care about almost every reimbursable activity—but that does not make every activity a central profit engine.

• There is not a single trustworthy national figure for “hospital profit per donor.” Hospital financial statements rarely isolate the donor-hospital margin cleanly, and the accounting differs sharply across hospitals.

• HOWEVER: Medicare reported roughly $3.3 billion in claimed organ-acquisition costs in 2016 and reimbursed about $1.6 billion—48%—as its share

  • And a more recent policy discussion reports that CMS cited 2024 data in which non-renal organ revenue exceeded non-renal acquisition cost by $100 million.

    • That shows a system-level possibility of over-recovery in a specific reimbursement category

• At the very least, it’s clear that a large transplant center with substantial Medicare organ-acquisition activity can receive meaningful reimbursement through its Medicare cost report, and being a high-performing donor hospital can improve the economics of its affiliated transplant programs.

One 2019 conference abstract using fiscal-year 2016 Medicare cost-report data estimated that each organ procured for an OPO or transplant center increased average Medicare organ-acquisition reimbursement by roughly:

• $10,918 per kidney

• $11,291 per liver

• $11,371 per heart

• $9,294 per lung

For the sampled transplant programs, the estimated average annual increase in Medicare reimbursement attributable to procurement was approximately:

• $456,243 for kidney programs

• $593,643 for liver programs

• $385,306 for heart programs

• $260,504 for lung programs

IMPORTANT: These are reimbursements, not net profits (there are donor-evaluation, OPO, procurement, transport, administrative, and allocation costs).

• But a lot of this is likely performed by already-salaried staff, so it’s like getting more billable hours out of them

Getting Off the Organ Donor Registry

SIMONE’S SOURCE: When you do the episode go over how you actually get removed from the registry because it’s not as simple as taking it off your license

There was a recent case of a man in New Jersey who converted to Islam had it removed from his license for religious reasons on the organ procurement organization insisted it was still a lifelong commitment

His family had to go to court

Key findings:

• The case reference is a 2026 New Jersey case involving Keith Lott

  • He had previously registered as a donor through his New Jersey drivers license

  • Later converted to Islam and did not reselect his donor option when he renewed his license in 2025

  • while he was on life support, representatives connected to the donation process told them his earlier registration was a “lifetime contract.”

  • Reporting said Lott’s family ultimately had to seek court intervention in a time-sensitive conflict over donation and burial.

    • Technically: There is no legal basis in New Jersey law for the claim that a donor designation cannot be revoked during the donor’s lifetime.

    • Allegedly: NJ Sharing Network reportedly said it accesses Motor Vehicle Commission donor-status information in real time to verify the most current status.

    • So probably what happened was the organ procurement organization was using outdated records and lying about them

• You cannot obtain absolute proof against every database or paperwork error, but you can make your revocation both legally clear and practically difficult to miss.

  • Make sure your license doesn’t have the designation

  • Make sure changing the designation = documented (e.g. you print + keep the receipt)

  • Make sure friends + family know you’re not an organ donor

  • A strong practical measure is to add a direct statement to your advance directive or health-care power of attorney. For example:

    • I revoke any prior anatomical gift, organ-donor registration, tissue-donation registration, eye-donation registration, whole-body donation, and authorization for postmortem research or education. I do not authorize the recovery, donation, transplantation, therapy, research, education, training, or other use of my organs, tissues, eyes, or body after death. My health-care agent and family are directed to communicate and enforce these wishes.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Simone Collins: Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited to be speaking with you today because I received a series of texts this morning that sent me down a very dark rabbit hole, and I need to pull you down that hole now. You’re coming with me. So it’s like 5:00 in the morning, okay? And I wake up, and this is what I get. “So you really need to do an episode on how brain death is fake.

Brain death was invented to produce organs for transplantation.” I gotta

[00:00:22] Terrified Man: get out of here. I’m really scared.

[00:00:24] Simone Collins: It’s not real. Lots of people pr- survive incurable brain death, most famously and most recently, TJ Hoover. The Organ Procurement Organization still insists they did nothing wrong in that case, even though the supposedly brain dead man sat in the audience for RFK’s announcement decertifying the OPO.

[00:00:42] Terrified Man: All right, let’s just, let’s calm down. Take a deep breath, okay?

[00:00:45] Simone Collins: Brain death is completely fake and gay, and you should get yourself off the organ donor registry and tell all your friends and family to do the same. Donors are given paralytics so they don’t move during harvest. They feel everything. Come here, come here, come here.

Oh, look up the Lazarus reflex. This is when the supposedly dead person tries to fight off the surgeon. Oh, and the apnea test, where they turn off your ventilator 10 minutes while you’re doped up on paralytics and fentanyl and propofol to prove brain death. There is no ethical basis for doing this test because the patient derives no benefit from it and instead can be harmed.

and if you care about healthcare costs, keep in mind that the main driver of this is transplants are wildly profitable for hospitals.

There’s far more money to be made into declaring someone dead and harvesting their organs and transplanting them and caring for the transplantees than leaving them in the ICU and giving them time.

[00:01:44] Malcolm Collins: So- So- Hold on. Side note before we go further here.

[00:01:46] Simone Collins: Yes. Do

[00:01:47] Malcolm Collins: you remember the fight we had early in our relationship?

Yes. Where you were mad at me because I t- had non-organ donor on my license?

[00:01:53] Simone Collins: Yeah. I was like, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you not an organ donor?” And

[00:01:56] Malcolm Collins: I was like- It’s a selfish thing ... “I’m sorry, I have friends who are doctors, and I know that they will kill people who would otherwise survive

[00:02:02] Simone Collins: for their organs.”

And I didn’t believe you, and I was wrong. I know. I knew this was gonna come up. I

[00:02:08] Malcolm Collins: am ... And now I have organ donor on my license because of you, Simone.

[00:02:12] Simone Collins: Are you serio- oh, are you serious? I thought- We need to get you a new driver’s license. We’re gonna get into this. That’s, that’s at the end, where we’re gonna talk about- This

[00:02:20] Malcolm Collins: is because of you.

You made me get this- ... ‘cause you said I was being unreasonable

[00:02:27] Simone Collins: I didn’t know. I didn’t know because it is ... Right, yeah, she con- she continues, “If you have agreed to be a donor, they can do all sorts of other sick stuff with you.” Oh my God, Malcolm, I’m so sorry. “Transplant a pig kidney and see how you live.

True story. Let residents use you to practice surgery. When you do an episode, go over how you actually get removed from the registry because it’s not as simple as taking it off your license.”

[00:02:51] Terrified Man: It was a nightmare. This was a nightmare. Walked right into a nightmare.

[00:02:54] Simone Collins: There was a recent case of a man in New Jersey who converted to Islam, had it removed from his license for religious reasons on the or- and the organ procurement organization insisted it was still a lifelong commitment.

His family had to go to court. So this is a lot. Okay,

[00:03:12] Malcolm Collins: and I was off the list-

[00:03:14] Simone Collins: And you are off the list ... until you made

[00:03:15] Malcolm Collins: me

[00:03:15] Simone Collins: get

[00:03:15] Malcolm Collins: on the list, Simone.

[00:03:17] Simone Collins: And you are on the list now. You are such a- And we need ... I, Malcolm, I am very sorry. I am very

[00:03:25] Malcolm Collins: sorry. You know what, Simone? See you next Tuesday. Okay? Because this episode’s going live on Tuesday.

[00:03:31] Simone Collins: Oh, God. Okay. Yeah, so anyway, she, she pointed me to this original Harvard 1968 paper on brain death where they’re super clear, she said, “There will be no public support for killing people for their organs, therefore, we need a new category of death to create public support for organ donation.” And that sounds disturbing, but let’s start off with going into the case of T.J.

Hoover because I think that that’s the best place to start. So according to some [00:04:00] reports, a person who’s actually met a complete, correctly performed formal determination of brain death by neurologic criteria does not recover. So the- Oh,

[00:04:10] Malcolm Collins: hold on, hold on. S- s- side note. That is an unhinged series of texts to get early in the morning.

[00:04:15] Simone Collins: I was pretty great. No, she’s

[00:04:17] Malcolm Collins: like the best- That is an unhinged series of- ... in the entire world ... texts to get early in the morning, and I’d be like ... ‘Cause, you know, th- you, you know this person. They’re a fan. W- you talk all the time. Mm. Right. They’re smart. They’re not unhinged. So you come at this and you’re like, “Wait, what?

What? What?”

[00:04:32] Simone Collins: But it’s all ... You don’t understand.

[00:04:34] Malcolm Collins: They’re harvesting people’s organs in the United States? What? And I was like, “Capitalism does have its drawbacks, Simone.”

[00:04:41] Simone Collins: Yeah, I’m, I’m really discovering this. Yeah, look It’s scary. So TJ Hoover, right? So th- h- this is what I’m trying to get at is a big problem with looking into this concept of brain death leading to organ donation, and, like, people incorrectly diagnosing brain death is they’re like, “Well, there’s no such thing as ever coming back from brain death.

You can’t do it. So if anyone comes back from brain death, they were just incorrectly diagnosed.” The problem is if you diagnose someone as brain-dead and they’re on the org- organ registry, they just kill you. So you don’t know if they’re gonna come back from being brain-dead. And, and so that’s kind of disturbing.

So anyway when you try to- Hold on.

[00:05:20] Malcolm Collins: Also, you remember my will around this as well, right?

[00:05:24] Simone Collins: Yes. Yeah.

[00:05:26] Malcolm Collins: Which this team filmed when they were like, “Why does your will say that y- y- that not to take you off at any g- at any cost?” Yeah.

[00:05:32] Simone Collins: Yeah, I’m

[00:05:35] Malcolm Collins: familiar with

[00:05:35] Simone Collins: this. Actually, I guess you do these stories, Simone.

Wait, so what did, what did your friends in the medical profession tell you?

[00:05:38] Malcolm Collins: Oh, it’s, it’s common, even if you know you can probably save somebody, to just l- put them on the organ list. Especially if you’re having to choose between individuals where you’re investing your time. Oh. And you’re like, “Oh, I could work on this person, or I could work on this person, but this person’s on the organ list.

And so it’s not just money from the hospital, but we could save X many additional lives if they die.” So it makes the calculation much easier to decide on this person.

[00:06:05] Simone Collins: Okay, so it’s also, like, a kind of triage issue.

[00:06:08] Malcolm Collins: It’s

[00:06:08] Simone Collins: so

[00:06:08] Malcolm Collins: common there’s a Scrubs episode about it.

[00:06:10] Simone Collins: Oh, God. Well, man, if it’s making it to Scrubs, the f- the friendly non-political-

[00:06:15] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this has been well known in, like, the industry for a while

[00:06:17] Simone Collins: Oh my...

Okay, great. Well, call me the last person under a rock who did not know this, but here’s what happened to TJ. I

[00:06:24] Malcolm Collins: told you about it.

[00:06:26] Simone Collins: Look- Yeah, I should believe you more. I’m sorry, Malcolm. It’s... What can I say? A waltz, okay?

[00:06:35] Malcolm Collins: A waltz. Exactly. This is a waltz right here. Great.

[00:06:39] Simone Collins: Great, great, great, great.

[00:06:41] Malcolm Collins: All women are like that.

[00:06:44] Simone Collins: Thanks, Malcolm. Anyway, disturbing case of Anthony Thomas, AKA T.J. Hoover II. He was hospitalized in Richmond, Kentucky in October of 2021, so not, like, forever ago, after a drug overdose and cardiac arrest. According, at least, to this report based on family and former organ procurement, procurement worker accounts.

And this is, like, primarily I got this from an NPR piece on it. He was severely neurological impair- neurologically impaired, and he entered an organ donation pathway. So I guess the same, this thing that you’re describing at a hospital happened. Like, oh, drug overdose. This guy’s, like, really, it’s really bad.

Like, shunt him into the organ donation pathway. But then what happened after is pretty alarming. While he was being moved toward the operating room, his sister said she saw him open his eyes and look around, and then she was told by the doctors it was a reflex. And then during cardiac catheterization was, which was supposed to, like, evaluate his heart for potential transplantation, former staff members, note the word former, said that Hoover woke and thrashed, and was then sedated.

So- So

[00:07:57] Malcolm Collins: they fired everyone who saw anything?

[00:07:59] Simone Collins: [00:08:00] I I don’t know exactly how they became former, but I, I think that they quit. Suspicious. But anyway, so they catheterized his heart, and he, it hurt, and he thrashed out, and this is not looking good. And then when he reached the operating room for planned organ recovery, a preservation worker described him as moving, thrashing, and visibly crying.

Two physicians reportedly refused to take part, presumably one of these the former one who had quit, and the organ recovery surgery was stopped. So good on those surgeons for being like, “I can’t do this.” Anyway, Hoover survived and the NPR reporting describes ongoing impairments in memory, and walking, speech, et cetera.

He lives with that same sister who’s now his legal guardian. So he, he’s really- But

[00:08:48] Malcolm Collins: how many times do they not stop? That everyone else in the hospital was just going along with this like they’d seen this happen 100 times before.

[00:08:56] Simone Collins: Yeah, no. We’ll, we’ll actually get into that and why typically it wouldn’t be likely that someone like him would be thrashing on a table even if they weren’t terminal.

[00:09:06] Malcolm Collins: Oh, because they put them under certain sedatives- Mm-hmm ... so you can’t tell, and he was- Oh my God.

[00:09:10] Simone Collins: Yeah. Anyway, Ward did survive. His family members understood, there’s a lot of contention here. There’s an investigation going on, but they say they were told he was either brain-dead or dead. And it’s hard to tell.

Like, it’s disputed as to whether there was a completed, valid, documented, formal brain-dead declaration. And that’s kind of weird, because if there was a formal one that was, like, logged, it would be in their system presumably. So

[00:09:39] Malcolm Collins: why were they taking him to harvest his organs?

[00:09:41] Simone Collins: I don’t know. So that’s-

[00:09:43] Malcolm Collins: Simone, this is so terrifying.

[00:09:46] Simone Collins: Yeah. So uncomfortable. Also, there, there are cases of people recovering from formal brain death declarations. They’re very rare. And- Even the one case that’s really prominent on this front that’s, like, a, a true confirmed recovery, they’re like, “Well, it doesn’t count.” So this, the strongest published case that can plausibly be described as survival after a formal brain death declaration involves a baby girl, and I can only talk about this ‘cause she made it, okay?

But a female infant was born at 35 weeks gestation. And that’s, that’s when Torsten, I think had his C-section. Like, so that’s- Mm-hmm ... that’s premature to the point where, like, at the very least they’d probably need to be in the NICU. And unfortunately, this baby girl suffered a cerebral hemorrhage.

[00:10:32] Malcolm Collins: And then- So the reason why she’s still alive is ‘cause they didn’t need organs of someone that young, it sounds

[00:10:37] Simone Collins: like. Presumably. Well, yes. I mean, I also think, you know, you can’t be living-

[00:10:40] Malcolm Collins: Oh, that’s gruesome.

[00:10:41] Simone Collins: Anyway, she was declared brain-dead between approximately 40 and 120 hours after birth. The report stated that apparent confounders were absent.

And instead of deteriorating, she actually gradually regained neurologic function, and was reported healthy at her year one follow-up. So I’m super, super happy and she’s okay, and this is one baby who’s okay. Mm-hmm. And I’m very happy about that, so this is good. But

[00:11:07] Malcolm Collins: now everyone- You can tell from Simone’s just a little shocked still.

[00:11:10] Simone Collins: I just need, I just need babies to be okay. And the, the guidance around this particular medical case, they’re like, “Well, we, we, we don’t endorse determining brain death in infants born before 37 weeks gestation because the neonatal examination and diagnostic evidence have not been sufficiently validated in that population.”

So they, they’re basically like, “Nah, that was a, that was a misdiagnosis,” ‘cause like, I don’t know. Infants-

[00:11:37] Malcolm Collins: They wouldn’t have had a problem with it had they had taken her organs and sold them for money.

[00:11:41] Simone Collins: I mean, I don’t know. But let’s, let’s get actually to that point of like, so it, it appears to be that in 1968 a bunch of people were like, “Look, there’s this problem, okay?

You can’t really harvest organs from a dead person. You need to harvest them when the person is alive. The problem is people are [00:12:00] not really cool with harvesting organs from living people, so how do we make this work?” And then you have this paper, and this paper, published in 1968 does indeed play a pivotal role in modern brain dead standards.

It explicitly considered organ transplant implications in terms of its like Well, I mean, part of the reason why it’s important to have this designation is organ transplants. And also enable procurement

[00:12:26] Malcolm Collins: of organs from living people So I’m super uncomfortable with, like, everything that’s happening right now.

[00:12:30] Simone Collins: I am too. That’s why, like, this morning I was like, okay. When sh- she was like, ‘You need to do an episode on this, this thing,’ I’m like, ‘Well,

[00:12:40] Malcolm Collins: yes we do.’ Anybody who hears about this needs to talk about this. I want this to go viral in our circles after this. I wanna see Leafly cover this. I wanna see Nucks cover this.

Th- I want this to be very public. I

[00:12:48] Simone Collins: know. All, all the state’s DMV websites are gonna be overwhelmed with everyone being like, “You need to give me a new license now.” Yeah. Because that is, yeah, like the, the number one thing you need to do in case you just don’t have time to listen to this whole episode, is go onto your state’s DMV website and- But

[00:13:05] Malcolm Collins: apparently that doesn’t do enough.

You’ve then gotta contact some other organization?

[00:13:08] Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s a, we’ll, we’ll get into it, but start with the DMV. That like first step, big time ‘cause they’re gonna check your license. Especially when things are happening real fast, if, you know, and your driver’s license is with you, they’re gonna check it, and if they see the wrong thing, they see that heart I don’t wanna know what happens.

Anyway so the Harvard Medical School’s Ad Hoc Committee’s August 1968 JAMA report titled A Definition of Irreversible Cona- Coma, sorry, set out the clinical criteria for a patient whose brain function was believed to have irreversibly ceased, and this criteria includes complete unresponsiveness, no spontaneous breathing, no spontaneous movement, absence of reflexes, a flat EEG as confirmatory evidence, and then there’s supposed to be repeat testing after 24 hours with exclusions for confounders like hypothermia or sedating drugs.

It didn’t actually use the term whole brain death, which later laws did, but it was foundational in creating this framework for brain death. And then later laws in the US in various states adopted formulation under which a person may be declared dead after the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory function for all functions, or all functions in the entire brain, including the brain stem.

And there are, there are different pathways for, like, circulatory and respiratory function cessation and brain deadness. So it’s... But it’s, I think it’s scarier for brain deadness, which is why we’re talking about it. Or I said brain death, sorry. Anyway, the report was allegedly meant to respond to two intertwined problems created by in- intensive care technology, which was getting a lot better in the 1960s.

Like, suddenly ventilators are able to preserve circulation and heartbeats in patients with catastrophic irreversible brain injury. And then they felt that because of this, doctors and families need some way to determine when it would be worth it to continue life support or if it’s better to, like, pull the plug.

And it, you know, I, I understand that. Like, I, I can understand a need for some kind of framework there. It’s just that once you introduce this framework to a system in which hospitals are making a profit, more of a profit from when someone happens to be brain dead, like, you get a problem. Anyway, it’s, the, the issue that is, is that aside from that very logical thing of like, we need to have a talk about this, the organ transplantation issue was prominent and explicit in this report and, and it, it’s not the first thing to discuss.

Jesus Christ. I know. I know. I know. Anyway, the downstream consequences of this meant that under prevailing medical and legal standards in the US, a properly determined brain dead patient is dead. Like, legally they’re dead, despite a ventilator maintained heartbeat, warm skin, and circulation. It’s, it’s treated as death and not a prognosis or a consent to withdraw care.

So it’s, it’s kind of [00:16:00] different from other, other similar, seemingly similar situations. And it’s, Anyway, let’s talk about how brain-dead patients are treated differently if they’re organ donors, ‘cause this is what really, really got me. ‘Cause part of me is like, “Okay, I get it,” right? And, and, and in a lot of cases, people who are

[00:16:19] Malcolm Collins: declared brain-dead- And I, I have to clarify for people.

When she made me put that organ donor thing on my card, she was still a progressive, okay? This was before-

[00:16:25] Simone Collins: Aw, thanks for... Yeah ...

[00:16:27] Malcolm Collins: you converted and woke up to the world is lying to you-

[00:16:31] Simone Collins: This, yeah, guys- ... about more shit than you’re aware

[00:16:33] Malcolm Collins: of ... this was

[00:16:33] Simone Collins: before Simone. It was the before Simone. I feel so bad.

[00:16:37] Malcolm Collins: We just live in a society that lies about everything, and like-

[00:16:40] Simone Collins: Yes

never question ... this was back when I, I don’t know, had more trust in institutions, I guess. Yeah, I,

[00:16:45] Malcolm Collins: Well, that’s a problem. Institutions are pretty evil things.

[00:16:51] Simone Collins: Yeah Yes. I, anyway, ugh right. So if you are declared brain dead, doesn’t matter if they got it right, I guess, you know, like sometimes they get it wrong, as we know from recent cases, but if they declare you brain dead, are you gonna get paralytics?

Yes, you’re going to get paralytics. They’re also referred to as neuromuscular blocking drugs. According to one bit of research I looked at this, everything’s linked in the show notes, about 90% of the time they’re using paralytics. Maybe they didn’t use them with this one guy, you know, who was, is like crying and like f- moving-

[00:17:28] Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah, because they don’t like to deal with that when they’re killing somebody, you know?

[00:17:31] Simone Collins: I, it’s, it’s unpleasant.

[00:17:32] Malcolm Collins: It’s a bummer.

[00:17:34] Simone Collins: So okay, paralytics are used. Are, are patients medicated for pain? No. Are pain meds sometimes used? Yeah. So one review that looked at one center’s cases found that about one third of brain dead donors received an opioid, most often fentanyl, and around 63 received an inhaled anesthetic such as sevoflurane or isoflurane, and about 90% received a neuromuscular blocker.

But is this to medicate for pain, and would, would it actually reduce pain? No. The medication is actually just standard procedure for organ preservation and to suppress spinal reflexes and stabilize physiology. They’re not necessarily enough to prevent pain. And there are no universally binding national or international intraoperative anesthesia guidelines for brain dead donor recovery.

So they’re just gonna use- Well, that’s

[00:18:31] Malcolm Collins: convenient ...

[00:18:32] Simone Collins: whatever they think is appropriate to make, to make the body not move and to keep the organs functioning. But if, I don’t know, if the paralyzed patient is not thrashing and the organs seem okay, they’re probably gonna save on their like pain medication budget.

So I’d not heard about the Lazarus reflex or Lazarus sign. Had you heard of that before?

[00:18:58] Malcolm Collins: I had not, but it sounds like just an excuse for murdering people.

[00:19:01] Simone Collins: I know, it’s like, it’s the, it’s like something, you know, when they, they throw the lobster in the, in the pot of boiling water and they’re like, “Oh, it’s-”

[00:19:10] Malcolm Collins: Just

[00:19:10] Simone Collins: a natural

[00:19:11] Malcolm Collins: reaction that lots of

[00:19:12] Simone Collins: you

[00:19:13] Malcolm Collins: have

[00:19:13] Simone Collins: Yeah.

It’s a, yeah, it’s not, it doesn’t hurt or any- Like, oh my God. Anyway, the Lazarus sign is a pattern of movement sometimes observed in people declared brain dead who remain on a ventilator. This person may flex both arms and elbows, raise their arms upward, bring their hands toward their neck, chin, or chest, or endo- endotracheal take...

Sorry, endotracheal tube. Or they’ll cross their arms over their chest, or occasionally lift or arch their upper body.

[00:19:44] Malcolm Collins: The, one of the really common parts of the Lazarus effect is when they start screaming, “I’m still alive. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me, I have a family.” That’s one of the most common of the symptoms that they have.

[00:19:56] Simone Collins: Ah. Yeah.

[00:19:58] Malcolm Collins: So- It’s a, it’s a [00:20:00] reaction that bodies have when they get scared.

[00:20:02] Simone Collins: Well, yeah. The standard explanation is that the movement is generated by neural circuits in the spinal cord and below the brain stem, without input from the cerebral cortex or brain stem. The, the, there’s no sound basis to describe it as a conscious defensive act if the brain death diagnosis was correctly made.

But that is if the diagnosis was correctly made. And also, like-

[00:20:26] Malcolm Collins: If it’s a real thing other than a diagnosis that they make to get organs

[00:20:31] Simone Collins: And here’s the thing about pain. There doesn’t really seem to be a scientific way to measure pain. Sci- like, doctors don’t have an, a way to know if a patient-

[00:20:41] Malcolm Collins: Yes, there is.

There’s the what, what scale? The scopal scale where they measure pain from, like, insects bites and they... There is a scientific way to measure pain, but there might not be a scientific way to measure pain in a person using an MRI or something. Subjectively,

[00:20:57] Simone Collins: like... Oh, wait. How does the bug thing work?

[00:21:01] Malcolm Collins: Okay, I’ll look it up while you

[00:21:02] Simone Collins: talk. ‘Cause I go into a doctor’s office and they’re like, “What level of pain do you have, one through 10?” But then if they think you’re, like, trying to get opioids or something, they’re like, “Mm, I don’t know about you.” And I, yeah, I mean, like, I, I know, I know people who have dealt with chronic pain throughout their lives, and- Okay,

[00:21:21] Malcolm Collins: yes, it’s called the Scoville system.

[00:21:23] Simone Collins: Okay, tell me how this works. It,

[00:21:24] Malcolm Collins: it was cr- it’s, it’s a Schmidt sting pain index, created by entomologist Dr. Justin O. Schmidt. It ranks the relative pain- That

[00:21:31] Simone Collins: is an autist

[00:21:32] Malcolm Collins: if I’d

[00:21:33] Simone Collins: ever seen one ...

[00:21:33] Malcolm Collins: of insect stings from ants, bees, and wasps on a numeric scale, much like the Scoville scale ranks the heat of chili.

Okay. How it works: one to four rating. The scale runs from zero, completely harmless or ineffective against human skin- Okay ... up to four, excruciating, incapacitating pain. Each whole number step up is roughly tenfold more painful than the next level. Firsthand testing, Schmidt cataloged the data by intentionally allowing himself to be stung by more than 80 species of insects over his career.

[00:22:00] Simone Collins: Right, but no, that’s just giving... That’s, that’s, like, a, a s- a spiciness meter. It’s the number of chilies on your menu. That’s not allowing a doctor to objectively be able to tell if a body in front of him is, is in pain or not. I mean, like, maybe they’re screaming and writhing, but, like, you don’t know if that’s acting or if that is real as, as, as, a, a third party.

There’s no way

[00:22:24] Malcolm Collins: to, like- Geez, looking at some of these insects, they can really do a number on you. Oh

[00:22:27] Simone Collins: f- okay, anyway. Sorry. The bullet ant? Hey, Frank, I need to get de-miked. Can, can we pause for a second?

[00:22:31] Octavian: Right, if the diagnosis was correctly made.

[00:22:35] Simone Collins: Oh. Anyway. So the way that, like, doctors put the, the Lazarus sign, they’re like, “Well, I mean, you know, because the, the arms appear to reach toward the face or tube, people sometimes describe it as trying to pull out the tube, or sitting up, or fighting the surgeon

which can be deeply unsettling to see, and it deserves a clear explanation before family members witness withdrawal of ventilation or donor surgery But that sounds awful dystopian and kinda like we need an explanation for these people who just- That is the most dysto- and

[00:23:13] Malcolm Collins: th- this is all coming in the context of I understand that organ donation saves lives,

[00:23:19] Simone Collins: but- And I know that’s where it feels super tricky about this

[00:23:20] Malcolm Collins: we need a better system for doing it than this. And we

[00:23:23] Simone Collins: need- Well, or at least to be like, look, ‘cause I think, you know, there’s a lot of people who are like, “If I’m damaged goods, I don’t, don’t bring me back. Like, I lived a full life. I’d love to do some good if, you know, I don’t wanna live the rest of my life severely disabled.”

‘Cause that’s, I mean, that is often what happens to to people who are declared brain-dead after a l- so, you know, it, it, and, and it is true that many, many patients who, who are declared bain- brain-dead don’t make it, even if they last for a really long time. So the paper I actually referenced when looking up the Lazarus effect, there’s this academic paper that specifically reported on two brain-dead patients who survived [00:24:00] for over 100 days after being declared brain-dead.

They note in the abstract of that paper that while typically someone who is declared brain-dead dies of some form of, like, cardiac arrest or, like, they just, their heart fails after a week. One was, like, they survived for, like, 117 days, and the other one survived for longer. And both had showed these Lazarus signs during that process.

And the paper does also note that organ donation was recommended to both families, but both families refused. So, I mean, good on them, but also, like, th- there is that conflict of these Me- very often people who do get this bad don’t survive. But then we have that, like, mm, like you said, like, you’ve heard of people in the medical profession who are like, “Yeah, sometimes we just won’t really bother to do this all the right way.

We’re not really properly diagnosing. We’re kind of triaging a situation, and it’s just easier for someone to be brain-dead than for us to have to work on them a whole lot more when, you know, I could save, spend

[00:25:03] Malcolm Collins: my time-” Well, I mean, I think that, that, that my take would be that we just need a lot more research into how to tell if somebody actually isn’t gonna come back, and that is just not something that there’s a lot of motivation for right now.

[00:25:14] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah. Because the, the money is in favor of funneling toward organ donation. Anyway, also sh- she’d mentioned the apnea test, so we’ll take a look at that. In the apnea test, what clinicians do basically is if someone, if you’re on oxygen support, they, they will s- get you to 100% in, in, like, your blood oxygen, and then they’ll just turn it off.

And what they’re trying to see is within this 10-minute window, if when your oxygen concentration goes down whether you will take a voluntary breath. And what my friend had said was, like, well, that, you know, like, th- they use this as part of maybe a classification for someone is brain-dead. But if someone is extremely sedated or on a bunch of other meds, look, they’re, they’re probably not gonna breathe on their own because they’re so-

[00:26:06] Malcolm Collins: Th- like, any sedated person is brain-dead for them.

Like, they’re just like-

[00:26:09] Simone Collins: Yeah, like, they could be pharmacologically paralyzed ... anyone you took to a hospital and put in this

[00:26:12] Malcolm Collins: situation would be in that situation.

[00:26:15] Simone Collins: So I look it up because when, when, when I first looked around it was like, well, that would never happen because current US guidelines specifically require that sedative effects and pharmacologic paralysis should be excluded and not present before the test can support a brain death determination.

But then I, I was like, well, okay I, I, y- these guidelines are not enforced. We actually can’t know with certainty that every US hospital or even every clinician in every case follows these 2023 guidelines around this test exactly. The guideline is a national professional standard. It, it’s supposed to improve consistency.

It’s not a law. It’s not like a, a hospital policy. And so there’s nothing technically in most cases, though there may be states where there actually are hard laws about this, not that I found- Mm-hmm ... while I was researching this though that say, like, you have to, like, make sure everything’s completely out of the system before you run this test.

However, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot stopping people. Let’s go to the, the mentions of, of, like-

[00:27:20] Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, one of the things to remember here is hospitals are systems.

[00:27:24] Simone Collins: Yes.

[00:27:24] Malcolm Collins: And there is a huge incentive for these people to die. And in addition to that huge incentive, there’s a huge incentive for them to not realize or not take moral culpability if they’ve been making a, a mistake here.

And on top of all that, there is a, a huge financial incentive because you’re not gonna get another job easily if you, if you whistle-blow on this. Yeah. And then on top of all that they believe that they’re probably doing the right thing because they’re saving more lives than they’re taking.

[00:27:54] Simone Collins: Like, they would- Yeah, and I mean, these are, again, like, these are cases where it’s, like, look, th- their odds of surviving are so low.

And I... These [00:28:00] are also often probably clinicians who are like, “I know this kid who needs a kidney so bad,” you know, this, this, this. And they’ve gotten to know them probably over time, I bet- Mm-hmm ... you know, if, if, if they’re- Yeah ... working in hospitals. And so, like, you know this kid. They’ve been on the list.

Like, they could die. They’re so sweet. You have a relationship with them. And then here comes in this stranger who had a drug overdose, and you’re like, “Who’s this,” you know, like, “jerk?” You know, like, what? There are, like, you know, someone comes in and, like, you know, they’re in their 30s and they’re a parent or whatever, but they just had a car accident.

Well, they’re probably dead, and it’s really busy, and who knows if we could even save them now, so it’s just better to declare them brain-dead, blah, blah, blah. So I get it. Like, it is, it is an ethically fraught situation. But from a personal standpoint, like, whoa. Anyway, it’s not just about what, like, this, this moment of triage.

It’s also about what happens to these live bodies. And that’s kind of where I have the problem with it. I’m like, okay, it’s one thing for, like, a doctor to be like, “All right, Simone, she looks pretty wasted. Like, she got really messed up in that car accident or whatever. Like, let’s just dec- declare this an organ donation situation.”

Look, if you’re gonna do that, if you’re gonna harvest my organs, I wanna be, like- I want the pain meds. I want the pain meds that are gonna work, okay? Like, I, I, and, and also, I didn’t know that, that a lot of other things can happen. So yes, there, there have been studies in which genetically modified pig kidneys were connected to or transplanted into brain-dead research patients.

There... You can see. I, I, I’ll link to it in the show notes, this, this study. Human brain-dead recipient model in solid organ xenotransplantation: a scoping review of technical and ethical issues. Hey, Mommy,

[00:29:39] Octavian: what are the chances of a tornado?

[00:29:42] Simone Collins: Very low. I saw that there was gonna be a little bit of rain around 3:00 PM and then clear for the rest of the evening, so you’re all set, buddy.

Now we’ve got to finish this up, and then I’m gonna go cut your hair, okay? Okay. Okay. I love you, buddy. Go, go do some chess strategy learning or watch something else educational or do lessons even better, okay?

[00:29:59] Octavian: Okay.

[00:30:00] Simone Collins: Okay. I

[00:30:00] Octavian: tried to go in your

[00:30:02] Simone Collins: room. Okay. I love you, buddy. I love you so freaking much. You, you be good.

He’s- Okay ... he’s doing his, his normal, his normal thing. Oh, he’s gone now. Okay. Close the door please.

Door? Okay, whatever. I don’t care. Where were we?

Right. So anyway, you can see that study, and it’s all about pig kidneys on organ donors. Also trainees can absolutely participate.

[00:30:35] Malcolm Collins: God, imagine a Muslim gets that. I can see why the Muslim man was so freaked out. Oh,

[00:30:40] Simone Collins: yeah, no kidding. I think it had to do more with burial, but you’re right that the, the pig kidney thing might be

[00:30:46] Malcolm Collins: a little- Yeah, wait, for Muslims, they need their body intact.

Remember our episode on the Muslim afterlife.

[00:30:49] Simone Collins: Oh, that’s it. Yeah, so it was about that. But yeah, anyway, the, the pig kidney thing would just add insult to

[00:30:55] Malcolm Collins: injury. One of our best videos, by the way. I strongly recommend it.

[00:30:57] Simone Collins: It’s a good one. It’s, it’s a very good one. It’s crazy

[00:31:00] Malcolm Collins: what Muslims- It’s- ... believe about the afterlife.

[00:31:04] Simone Collins: Yeah, and then even the additional things we learned in the comments, like, “Well, and you can see their shins through their legs, and their eyes, or...” Anyway, ooh. Ooh. Okay. Back to brain-dead. Where-

[00:31:15] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, she’s talking about the sex slaves they all get in the afterlife.

[00:31:19] Simone Collins: Yes, the virginal companions.

[00:31:23] Malcolm Collins: If you haven’t seen that one, for a bit of a teaser-

I would get at least one extra wife. All Muslims get at least one extra wife.

[00:31:30] Simone Collins: Yeah. Yes, this is true. I mean, you would get more. You’ve been so great. So I’d have to, I’d have to compete, but I wouldn’t feel bad about it, because that would happen to me if I make it to heaven. Though probably not, because Muhammad saw more women in the fire, and I clearly have done wrong by you telling you to go on the organ donation registry.

Oh my God. So I guess I’m gonna burn in the fire. Thanks, Malcolm. Fantastic. Anyway yeah, so, y- it’s not just that you may get [00:32:00] some kind of weird experimentation, it’s also that the trainees might operate on you, ‘cause they’re like, “Oh, what are we...” You know, who cares if you flub something a little bit.

You know, you just do the practice operation on the brain-dead patient. But then things like actual whole body donation for anatomy teaching or dissection in, in some forms of practice surgery, apparently you need to, like, sign up extra for that. I’m not really sure how that works. I don’t know. I mean, you got brains from people for things.

[00:32:31] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

[00:32:31] Simone Collins: Schizophrenic people. Presumably those schizophrenic people were, like- And

[00:32:34] Malcolm Collins: none of them were brain-dead. They were dead dead.

[00:32:36] Simone Collins: I know. But- Presumably they said, “You can have my brain,” correct?

[00:32:42] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Presumably? I don’t know. A lot of them were sort of like wards of the state.

[00:32:49] Simone Collins: So you were just part of this system that was like, “I don’t know where this brain came from.”

I don’t care

[00:32:54] Malcolm Collins: about taking

[00:32:55] Simone Collins: brains- “I’m just here to pick up the brain.” Whole

[00:32:57] Malcolm Collins: brain. I think it’s quite different to take body parts from a dead person-

[00:33:01] Simone Collins: Yes, this is true ... than

[00:33:01] Malcolm Collins: taking body parts from

[00:33:03] Simone Collins: a not dead person. No, 100%, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s true. That’s true. I mean, I prefer to be turned into diamonds, so I want all of that carbon so that all of my children can wear a bit of dead mommy.

But you do you. We really need to buy a diamond compression machine ‘Cause they’re just individually so expensive. This is what you’re gonna have to use my life insurance to buy, and you’re gonna be very angry about.

[00:33:26] Malcolm Collins: The, the diamond machine? Yeah. And then I’ll sell them? We’ll make it a techno puritan thing.

Oh

[00:33:29] Simone Collins: my God, yes. And everybody get to be a diamond. See, you could sell them, so it’ll have an ROI. Buy a piece of, buy a piece of history. It’ll be great. No,

[00:33:38] Malcolm Collins: for other people. You make it like a techno

[00:33:39] Simone Collins: puritan funeral, right? Oh, right, right, right, right, right, right. Oh yeah, never mind, yeah. So yeah, you can just keep mine for the family jewels.

That, come on. How cool would that be if the family jewels- I love you’re

[00:33:49] Malcolm Collins: like on Alibaba, buy a machine for turning dead bodies into diamonds I

[00:33:53] Simone Collins: found some. They look legit, and I mean, it’s such a big industry now. I, I don’t think there’s,

[00:33:59] Malcolm Collins: you know- It’s not an industry I’d have fun working in if I’m going to be honest.

I don’t want dead bodies showing up at the house.

[00:34:05] Simone Collins: They’re not... They’re ashes. They’re not gonna give you the thing, the, the meat part. They give you the burnt part. And we had my mom’s ashes sitting in our house for the longest time before you found the perfect tree, and that was very thoughtful of you.

Thank you.

[00:34:21] Malcolm Collins: The tree’s doing really well, by the way.

[00:34:22] Simone Collins: I know. You’re the best. You really are the best. Anyway, think about it, Malcolm, okay?

[00:34:30] Malcolm Collins: I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it.

[00:34:32] Simone Collins: Right? We’re burning me.

[00:34:33] Malcolm Collins: I’ll do a GoFundMe when you die.

[00:34:35] Simone Collins: Oh, you’re not even gonna use the life... Well, I guess you probably are not allowed to use-

[00:34:39] Malcolm Collins: No, I, the life insurance,

[00:34:41] Jerry: I’m gonna use that on the kids.

You crazy?

[00:34:42] Simone Collins: No, that’s true. The, never mind, you’re right. Ah, what was I... Yeah, no, honestly, like that, the only reason I don’t wanna die is ‘cause I, I need the, I need to take care of you and I need to take care of the kids, and that is, is why. Life

[00:34:53] Malcolm Collins: insurance isn’t a windfall. I’ve got a date.

[00:34:56] Simone Collins: Oh, great. Right. Of course.

Anyway, moving on let’s get to the business of organ harvesting, and I think this is where it sort of is like, like a lot of this could just be well-intentioned people trying to do their best. It, it gets a little messy sometimes. It becomes a problem when there’s a systematic need for organs. So just to set the scene, broad hospital operating margins are really thin.

This organization called KFF, which is linked in the show notes, reported a national average hospital operating margin of 5.2% in 2023. Mm-hmm. And then more recent non-profit system reporting found a median 1.5% operating margin in 2024. And in that environment, managers are going to care about every reimbursable activity.

And even if it’s not a central profit driver, an organ donation isn’t for hospitals. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s the, the flashy like outpatient stuff, hip replacements, et cetera, [00:36:00] whatever, right? Like the, the kind of routine, easy stuff that they can just kind of make a lot of money on, and they can just run people through.

But- Organ donation is one of those things where you can kind of turn a situation that would possibly be even be a negative into a positive. And so there, there isn’t any single trustworthy national figure for hospital profit per donor ‘cause hospitals don’t separate out organ donation as like a line item in their financials, which I think they should.

But Medicare reported roughly 3.3 billion in claimed organ acquisition costs in 2016, and reimbursed around 1.6 billion. That is to say 48% as its share. And a more recent policy discussion reports that, Basically, 2024 data in which non-renal organ revenue exceeded non-renal acquisition cost by 100 million, which shows some kind of system level possibility of over-recovery in a specific reimbursement category.

And I don’t know why they’re separating out renal and non-renal organs. Maybe you do, but whatever. It-- There are, there are financial incentives, especially when the margins are that thin, and that makes me worried. So it’s, it’s clear that basically any large transplant center with substantial Medicare organ acquisition activity is gonna receive a very meaningful reimbursement through its Medicare cost report.

And if you have a high-performing donor hospital, it, it could really improve not just its own economics, but then this economics of this whole affiliated organ transplant organization ecosystem, which could be putting pressure on doctors. There’s-- I found one 2019 conference abstract using fiscal year 2016 Medicare cost report data that estimated that each organ procured for an one of those organ, like, organizing operations increased average Medicare organ acquisition reimbursement by roughly $10,918 per kidney, 11,291 per liver, 11,371 per heart, 9,294 per lung.

And if you add all those things up, like one human that has a decent kidney, liver, two, two lungs, and a heart, that can-- Y- that’s, that’s a decent amount of money. Anyway for the standard transplant programs, the estimated average annual increase in Medicare reimbursement attributable to procurement was approximately 460...

Sorry, 456,000 for kidneys, 593,000 for liver programs, e- 383 for heart, et cetera. Anyway, these are reimbursements. They’re not the net profits. But also, like, I don’t know how much in terms of incremental costs you have for things like organ extraction at a hospital. I mean, presumably you have, like, your doctors who are on call.

Like, y- you’re paying your s- your s- salaried staff to do this stuff. And I would probably, if I were the hospital, have a brain-dead patient scheduled for organ transplantation. Like, I would just- Mm-hmm ... fit them in to unscheduled spots, right? And then of, like, slow times ‘cause you can just kinda keep them alive as long as you want, like, within at least a week before they’re very likely to die, and then you just slot them in.

So I don’t think the marginal cost of processing people for organ transplantation costs hospitals incrementally that much more. So as far as I’m aware, as far as I can figure, it’s just upside Anyway, this

[00:39:45] Malcolm Collins: is what I have to do Isn’t that great? Every day you get potential organs coming through your door

[00:39:52] Simone Collins: I mean, if I were a hospital administrator, I would have a difficult time seeing it as anything other than that, wouldn’t you?

If you’re that concerned. Yeah. If you’re running at a [00:40:00] 1.5% margin-

[00:40:01] Malcolm Collins: Oh, absolutely.

[00:40:02] Simone Collins: Yeah ... that’s so thin. I mean, you are definitely chewing people out for not-

[00:40:06] Octavian: Mom, can I have... I want some of the spicy popcorn.

[00:40:08] Simone Collins: Friend, I... Whoa, why do you smell like barbecue? Buddy, you eating chips. Why am I gonna give you more junk food if you’re just already eating junk food?

Friend, I’m gonna be down in about 10 minutes. Can you give me time until then, please? I love you. And off he goes. Anyway, we need to get you off the organ do- donor registry. We need to get me off the organ donor registry, and I’m just gonna, I’m gonna go through first a scary case of the, the Muslim convert, and then we’re gonna talk about how to do it.

So this was actually in 2026. It... This is a man in New Jersey named Keith Lott. He, he previously registered as a donor through his New Jersey driver’s license, just like we all do. For those of, who are outside the US, when you get a driver’s license in the United States, they ask you on your little form, “Would you like to be an organ donor?”

And on your driver’s license, if you are an organ donor, you have a little heart, a little cute red heart. And if you see someone’s license that doesn’t have the little red heart, you just know that they’re a jerk, a selfish jerk who doesn’t wanna save that poor Jimmy who just needs a

[00:41:17] Malcolm Collins: kidney. What you said to me.

[00:41:19] Simone Collins: There’s a lot, there is like, there is genuine social pressure around it. Like, if someone’s looking at your driver’s license and they, you know, believe in helping kidney, heart transplant, whatever, like vulnerable people get the organs they desperately need, they, they’re gonna judge. And also keep in mind, the effective altruist community’s pretty famous for donating kidneys like going out of their way to give organs.

Of course, they’re all gonna register as organ donors too. I

[00:41:47] Malcolm Collins: mean, I think what we should do is make it legal for living people to donate organs for money.

[00:41:52] Simone Collins: For... No, like actually. I, I think that that’s super important. I, I wish that that were the case because it would make things, I think, in many ways, more ethical.

You could make constraints for it. Look, you can set, you know, if this person is impoverished, then they can’t, or whatever. I don’t care. But like make it- Or

[00:42:08] Malcolm Collins: pre-sell your organs if you reach a certain state of health.

[00:42:13] Simone Collins: Daddy, you- Oh, like if you’re not healthy enough, you can’t sell them?

[00:42:16] Malcolm Collins: Did you set off a mousetrap?

[00:42:18] Octavian: No. I just- Not at all. You had a call before.

[00:42:22] Malcolm Collins: Oh, I did?

[00:42:23] Octavian: Yeah. Yeah,

[00:42:23] Malcolm Collins: it looks like spam

[00:42:26] Octavian: What’s spam?

[00:42:27] Malcolm Collins: What’s spam? Spam means it’s a random person that really didn’t wanna reach me. They were just trying to sell me something. It’s like a scam.

[00:42:35] Octavian: Okay.

[00:42:36] Malcolm Collins: Hey, thanks for helping.

[00:42:38] Octavian: Yeah,

[00:42:49] Simone Collins: you’re welcome. I thought it was someone important. Aw. We’ll be done super soon, Octavian. Okay, okay. Oh, good lord. Anyway, so after he converted to Islam and did not reselect his donor option in 2025 He finds himself very tragically on life support, and representatives connected to the donation process told his family that his earlier registration was a lifetime contract.

And p- reporting of this case says that his-

[00:43:14] Malcolm Collins: Nobody told me that when I ticked a freaking box. And did you know that the main thing that effective altruists have talked about when I’ve talked to them in their meetings is making it the default when you sign up for- Yes.

[00:43:25] Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah,

[00:43:26] Malcolm Collins: And if they’re gonna treat it as a lifetime contract and it’s the default option on a long standardized form, that is wildly unethical.

That just makes me hate these organizations.

[00:43:37] Simone Collins: Oh, so hold on. Hold on. There, there actually is no legal basis in New Jersey law for the claim that a donor registration cannot be revoked during the donor’s lifetime. And allegedly- Oh, in New

[00:43:47] Malcolm Collins: Jersey law. What about Pennsylvania? What about any other state?

[00:43:50] Simone Collins: I, I know. I know, I know. We all have to look this up. But allegedly, the New Jersey sharing network reportedly said that it accesses Motor Vehicle Commission donor status [00:44:00] information in real time to verify the most current status, but what appears to have happened is the organ procurement organization was using outdated records and then just lying about them.

This whole lifetime con- they just made that up. They’re like, “Look, his name’s on the list. We’re, we’re taking his organs.” And so his family had to, to seek court intervention in this very time-sensitive conflict in order to stop the process. So another element of this that concerns me isn’t just, like, oh, is the person actually brain-dead?

Did you actually get the diagnosis right? It’s also, did this person actually consent to this? Like, are you, are you even checking up-to-date records? What if they changed their mind because they saw this episode? I don’t know. Mm-hmm. But what you need to do if you want to change it is first, if you’re in the United States, go to your DMV state website and-

[00:44:59] Malcolm Collins: Are you gonna book time for this?

Or are you gonna handle this

[00:45:02] Simone Collins: for me? Yes. I a- I am going to handle this for you, Malcolm. Yes. I obviously got you in this problem. I’m going to get us out of it. But you, you have to first make sure your license doesn’t have that designation, and then you need to make sure that when you change the designation, that you print and keep the receipt.

Then you need to make sure that your friends and family know that you’re not an organ donor. So you have to very openly broadcast, and they’re gonna criticize you, and you’re gonna have to push through and just send them a link to the show notes that we have on Patreon or Substack.

[00:45:31] Malcolm Collins: Well, no, our friends and family know- You’re not gonna tell all of them

because our fans know, okay?

[00:45:36] Simone Collins: Okay, fine. But who’s gonna be at the hospital? And you

[00:45:38] Malcolm Collins: know we’re gonna be telling my brother about this.

[00:45:41] Simone Collins: I’m su- yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say I’m sure he’s not, but he probably would’ve said, “Yeah, I’ll, I’ll do it,” you know? ‘Cause he’s such a nice person too, and like, ugh, God. Anyway, make sure that the people who are gonna show up at the hospital if something bad happens to you know that you’re super not cool with it, and then a very strong practical measure on top of that is to add a direct statement to your advance directive or healthcare power of attorney that’s something like, and I have this written down in the show notes, “I revoke any prior anatomical gift, organ donor registration, tissue donor registration, eye dono- donor registration, whole body donation, and authorization for post-mortem research and education.

I do not authorize the recovery, donation, transplantation, therapy, research, education, training, or other use of my organs, tissues, eyes, or body after death. My healthcare agent and family are directed to communicate and enforce these wishes.” So I don’t know. Consult a lawyer. This is not legal advice, but Don’t show up to stuff without documented not f- no, no taking, no touch.

I would, I would appreciate if you all did that. But then of course I feel conflicted because, like, if you’re actually donezos you know, if you wanna give your organs. I, I feel so- Yeah ... but also I, I, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna be brain dead, but also maybe not brain dead and maybe feeling all the pain as they harvest my organs, so I don’t know.

Where are you with all this?

[00:47:15] Malcolm Collins: I mean, I think this is horrifying. I can’t believe that you... This whole Lazarus effect thing, the way that they word it, I’m sure it- Subreflex ... in part a real effect and-

[00:47:26] Simone Collins: I’m sure ...

[00:47:27] Malcolm Collins: something they say to sleep at night, you know?

[00:47:29] Simone Collins: I’m sure. Yes, both. I mean, well, so here’s, like, where I have a problem with it.

They’re like, “I mean, it’s impulses in your spinal cord,” and I’m like, yeah, but it’s also, like, maybe this is due to my very poor understanding of biology, but it’s, you know, like, impulses in my spinal cord, et cetera, that, like, cause me to feel things.

[00:47:48] Malcolm Collins: And you- Yeah, impulses. That is true. That is how-

[00:47:50] Simone Collins: So- ...

[00:47:51] Malcolm Collins: your entire nervous system works, is impulses in your spinal cord.

[00:47:53] Simone Collins: Yeah. You know, that’s being like, “Oh, it’s just your pain receptors firing. Like, don’t worry about it.”

[00:47:59] Malcolm Collins: And I’m like, “Hmm.” It has [00:48:00] to do with how complicated the motion is, and I’m sure there are some simple, you know, like, you cut a snake in half and the bottom half is still writhing, right? Like- Uh-huh

simple actions that are just happening because of the spinal cord, but a lot of it doesn’t sound like that. A lot of it sounds like they understand that, that, like, we’re doing something, we just don’t care. Like, that’s what I’m getting from this. I’m glad you brought this up. I’m glad we did an episode on this.

[00:48:26] Simone Collins: I’m glad my friend told me about it early in the morning.

[00:48:30] Malcolm Collins: So, guys, please, please, please check out rfab.ai. It is our AI website. I really want to share this with you guys, with the world- It’s amazing ... and use. It is the best AI chatbot site in terms of allowing you to use frontier multi-window models, which is just, in, in terms of technology, if you compare it to something like Janitor AI or, you know, ChatGPT or, you know, FlowGPT and, like- Well, I’ve actually...

[00:48:55] Simone Collins: An important note. I’ve heard a lot of companies advertising, like, “Oh, well, you just need one place where you can switch between, you know, one thing and the other instead of paying for all the subscriptions separately. This is much more affordable.” The problem with them is that they are In this case, for-profit companies that are not run by people who are just really nerdy about them and they need to make money.

And like, I guess we really do need to make money. We’re just very bad at it. And so you, you charge much less of a margin, right? The indus- industry standard for charging-

[00:49:27] Malcolm Collins: Is four, well it’s three to five x is the industry standard. Are you serious? And we charge 50%. Yeah.

[00:49:32] Simone Collins: Right. So we are charging, like in terms, like if you

[00:49:34] Malcolm Collins: actually- Oh, oh, sorry.

We don’t even always charge at 50%. Yeah. If something is a stable price and large, like video production, ‘cause that’s very costly we charge half that.

[00:49:43] Simone Collins: Sometimes I feel like we’d be operating on hospital margins, my friend. I mean, especially when you add in like the, the vibe coding expense, we’re op- operating on what?

Much worse than hospital margins right now.

[00:49:52] Malcolm Collins: Well, we’re operating on negative margins, but we’ll be dead soon. We’ll

[00:49:54] Simone Collins: be dead soon. Extremely negative margins. But I would say from that perspective, like if you remember the days of like startups offering extremely inexpensive but high quality services, because they were basically subsidized by VC money, we’re the equivalent of that except we’re subsidized by like Malcolm’s intensely laborous volunteer labor.

And our, I don’t know, pathological inability to-

[00:50:23] Malcolm Collins: Well, a lot of people will be like- ... take money ... “Then why aren’t you more expensive than my other site?” And it’s like, because we use frontier models. You’re like freaking Jerry in, in a, in a simulation set at 5%.

[00:50:33] Alien: Well, cap his sector at 5% processing, keep his settings on auto, and we’ll deal with him later.

Rick Sanchez is the target.

[00:50:39] Jerry: National Apple Farmers of America. I give you your new slogan.

[00:50:43] Terrified Man: Yes.

[00:50:44] Jerry: You do? Yes. So I sold it?

I sold the idea? Yes. Oh, my God. Thank you.

[00:50:53] Octavian: You

[00:50:53] Jerry: are

[00:50:53] Malcolm Collins: welcome. And when she said that’s all of the stuff, it is all of the stuff. We give you all of the options for image generation. We give you all of the options for video generation. We give you options for putting an image here and then, like, a line here.

That’s, like, the layout thing. It’s the, the new feature. We are working on better image generation. No,

[00:51:12] Simone Collins: that’s... Bruno pointed that out, right? I- thank you, Bruno. We

[00:51:15] Malcolm Collins: appreciate that. Yeah. We are working on the- our 3D generation- Music ... is pretty good. The, the rigging system is pretty good. Our little puck, you know, offline system for giving it to your kids for educational purposes is pretty good.

You know, we’ve got, like, you dump a document in, it’ll turn it to audio so you can listen to it. We’ve got audio to audio. Base AI yesterday had a hiccup where it didn’t work for part of the day, and it was shunting to OpenAI. I am so sorry. I didn’t know the AI had built it that way. I fixed it. Now, if it’s ever broken, it’ll just tell you.

It’s back to working now, so don’t worry. But, like, the, the roads model’s fantastic for, like, super base stuff. Just, you know, all of, all of these cool things you can play with. And it is, it is meant for chuds. You know,

[00:51:58] Simone Collins: that’s the- It, it is really good. It’s, it’s genuinely really, [00:52:00] really good. Oh, you...

Also anime dubbing. You forgot that. But not just anime dubbing. It’s like, because it’s... This is all from a, such a, an enthusiastic and genuine perspective on Malcolm. Like, Malcolm didn’t just want anime dubbing and, like, generic AI voices. The accents come through. It’s insane. Like, if someone’s supposed to be a hick, they’re gonna sound like a hick.

Which I do not know how that, that works. It seems like magic to me. I know it’s just technology I don’t understand, but I really like it.

[00:52:27] Malcolm Collins: What, what, what hick?

[00:52:29] Simone Collins: The, the, the anime dubber. I know it’s not just anime dubbing. I guess it’s any dubbing, but how the accents come through.

[00:52:35] Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah. It’s really cool.

[00:52:37] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:38] Malcolm Collins: So that this one is- Yeah, I mean, we offer all the APIs, and I work really hard to find the cheapest ones for you guys. You know, you have the stuff we can do.

[00:52:48] Simone Collins: So check that out. Because it’s... I’m so sorry. I did not sleep very much.

[00:52:54] Malcolm Collins: It’s really good. Well, let’s let you sleep extra early today. I

[00:52:56] Simone Collins: would like that.

This has been a day.

[00:52:58] Malcolm Collins: I’m not very hungry, so I’m not gonna eat.

[00:53:00] Simone Collins: Did you eat all those chips too?

[00:53:03] Malcolm Collins: I ate one bag of chips.

[00:53:04] Simone Collins: Oh. One small bag.

[00:53:05] Malcolm Collins: Well, then,

[00:53:05] Simone Collins: Malcolm, you need to eat something.

[00:53:07] Malcolm Collins: Just not feeling it. I’ll have salsa or something.

[00:53:15] Simone Collins: You need to take c- care of you. I guess you did have a smoothie. You ate a smoothie and you’ve... No, that is not enough food. That is not a... What am I gonna do with you? Did you know that, like, in, in, in 1950s home ec classes, y- you know, a, a, a, a wife of a house was taught, basically trained as, as a, a nutritionist as well.

Like, you learned how to cook, you learned how to fix things, and you were taught about the different nutritional needs at different- Mm-hmm ... ages for different people, different levels of activity. And it is my task, even though our society has completely dropped those lessons-

[00:53:52] Malcolm Collins: Nutrition ...

[00:53:53] Simone Collins: to be concerned about your nutritional needs and a balanced diet.

[00:53:58] Malcolm Collins: And when I just say for a few days when I’m grieving, “I’m sorry, I don’t feel like eating,” you think I’m gonna die?

[00:54:03] Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, it’s been several days now. And, and I mean, it was one thing when I told you, and then you, you couldn’t eat, and then another day passed, but now it’s been, like- Five days? Mm. So maybe we can take better care of

[00:54:21] Malcolm Collins: ourselves.

I’ll survive.

[00:54:22] Simone Collins: Mm-mm.

[00:54:23] Malcolm Collins: Simone, it’s important that we act happy for the fans and that we put on a, a good, a good act so that we got, we got cheerful, fun episodes for everyone, everyone having a good time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least I have my alcohol, you know? I, I, I, I still like that.

[00:54:45] Simone Collins: It’s not great. I love you.

I love you and who you are, and I’m gonna go get you off the organ donor registry, and I’m sorry. I apologize. I was wrong. Don’t worry. And at the very least, you got a really big, fat I told you so out of all this,

[00:55:01] Malcolm Collins: so. But eventually, I think where this unfortunately needs to go is you need enough people withdrawing themselves so that they redo the way the system works so that it makes sense to be on it, right?

Like, right now I’m scared to be on it because of the way that they’re acting around this and not admitting that these are major mistakes and charging people with punishments around this. I mean, I think this should be capital punishment ar- around some of this stuff, right? Like, that, that you would... I- i- if not that, very severe jail time.

[00:55:32] Simone Collins: I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s... There, there

[00:55:35] Malcolm Collins: are issues with this too, and- The thing I don’t get is the Muslim guy, right? Like, the number of cases where somebody has taken themselves off to be that greedy about his organs is absurd.

[00:55:47] Simone Collins: Well, yeah, I mean, especially if a family’s like, if it’s not on his driver’s license, and if his family is saying, “No, he’s Muslim.

Don’t do it,” I mean, I feel like I’d just back off. But I also am aware now of [00:56:00] the institutionally in endemic pressures on hospitals and all these organizations to just like, “No, we have to, we need to take this.” Like, we are not going to be i- net- net positive at the end of the year if we do not get, like, this certain quota.

It’s very scary. So I don’t know what to do about it aside from get us off right now and we need to reevaluate later. But I would... Look, maybe this isn’t gonna matter really soon because we’re starting to grow organs from stuff

[00:56:32] Malcolm Collins: Animals. Yeah, w- stuff, which I’m, I’m awesome for. You

[00:56:36] Simone Collins: know? I’m awesome for. Yes, stuff.

Stuff based organs which of- I want

[00:56:41] Malcolm Collins: more stuff based organs for

[00:56:43] Simone Collins: my- Let’s get the stuff based organs ...

[00:56:44] Malcolm Collins: my immortality.

[00:56:45] Simone Collins: You can just shove in another, an extra one. You know, just have two hearts. Why not? A backup heart. I want

[00:56:51] Malcolm Collins: all the organs. I will be a, a, a time Lord. I

[00:56:53] Simone Collins: will have two

[00:56:54] Malcolm Collins: hearts.

[00:56:55] Simone Collins: Shove them all in.

Doesn’t he have four?

[00:56:56] Malcolm Collins: I think he has two, but it, like, wouldn’t be efficient. It’s a bad way to do it. You can see he has extra valves or something. He had

[00:57:02] Simone Collins: two hearts. Didn’t didn’t brachiosauruses have two hearts? They had the butt heart.

[00:57:08] Malcolm Collins: Right.

[00:57:08] Simone Collins: And the head heart.

[00:57:09] Malcolm Collins: That makes sense for a giant animal.

[00:57:10] Simone Collins: I mean, oh, no.

Was it the brain? There’s a butt brain and a head brain.

[00:57:14] Malcolm Collins: Maybe, but I don’t know. You, you- Whatever ... you need to go make the kids dinner and get to bed extra early, and I’m gonna come down policing you to make sure you do.

[00:57:22] Terrified Man: Thank you.

[00:57:23] Malcolm Collins: Which means I will beat you senseless if you are still down there past 6:30, okay?

What? And, oh, I’m not allowed to say that to my wife. Oh, I thought this was America. I thought this was America. What is this,

[00:57:39] Terrified Man: a communist country or something? I thought this was America.

[00:57:42] Simone Collins: Oh, my goodness gracious.

The world is so strange. I don’t know what to do. Okay, bye. Merry Christmas. Bye.

[00:57:55] Malcolm Collins: Oh, Substack. If you like weekend episodes, check us out

[00:57:58] Simone Collins: Also all the stuff’s linked, all the weird research Page

[00:58:00] Malcolm Collins: young. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah,

[00:58:01] Simone Collins: yeah. Yeah Xenomorph something something You add that. Yeah, whatever. The mic? Yes.

That’s my fetish.

[00:58:10] Malcolm Collins: Why?

[00:58:11] Simone Collins: I don’t know. It’s just, there’s something really cute about the sound of you chewing to me, and I don’t know.

[00:58:17] Malcolm Collins: Everyone else says, like, “That’s when I started hating him.”

[00:58:24] Simone Collins: You’re not chewing into the mic. This is for me. You’re not putting this in the podcast. Just only for- Oh no, I

[00:58:30] Jerry: am. I’m putting your weird fetish

[00:58:31] Simone Collins: in the podcast. Malcolm, you are going to anger people. No one wants to hear anyone eating or slurping, but for some reason I also

[00:58:38] Malcolm Collins: like- But they wanna see you acting like a freaking pervert with your weird ASMR nonsense.

[00:58:44] Simone Collins: I just like the sound of you chewing. I don’t-

[00:58:46] Malcolm Collins: Now, hold on, Simone. Yeah. So this is what the team told me.

[00:58:49] Simone Collins: Okay. And

[00:58:49] Malcolm Collins: I was like, I do not believe this, okay?

[00:58:52] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:58:52] Malcolm Collins: But they had it confirmed with multiple people, so we’ll see.

[00:58:54] Simone Collins: Confirmed with... Okay.

[00:58:57] Malcolm Collins: That having designer babies is now a status symbol in, like, upper class New York circles.

Oh

[00:59:05] Simone Collins: yeah, The Economist basically endorsed it, and now it’s okay. It’s chic. What? Because The Economist endorsed it, yeah.

[00:59:10] Terrified Man: What? Yeah, actually. So we started this thing and now everyone-

[00:59:13] Simone Collins: We didn’t start it. Oh my God, though, did we? Because what if it was Barclay Bram, who works at The Economist, chilled with the cool folks at Natal Con.

We got Thai food together. Maybe he was like, “Yeah.”

[00:59:26] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

[00:59:26] Simone Collins: Okay?

[00:59:27] Malcolm Collins: What the heck?

[00:59:28] Simone Collins: They may be hipster eugenicists, but they’re not the most evil people. I don’t know, ‘cause we’ve, like, tried to be helpful to him over time occasionally. Maybe that’s the connection.

[00:59:38] Malcolm Collins: That’s how you win, if you just be nice. Oh, we’ve gotta connect him with Yuki Jaru.

You should have her email. We

[00:59:44] Simone Collins: did already. We did. Oh, we did. Good, good, good. We did on Friday. That is so... Yes, no, I’ve, I’ve, I- I had, like, I had that as sort of, the theosophical

[00:59:54] Malcolm Collins: episode topic- What about our friend who

[00:59:55] Simone Collins: was canceled? But no one’s there. Has she said she’ll talk with him? Which

[00:59:57] Jerry: one?

[00:59:57] Malcolm Collins: For b- the trans comments.[01:00:00]

Going to SlutCon?

[01:00:03] Simone Collins: Oh, I need, I need to ask. I need to ask, sorry.

[01:00:06] Malcolm Collins: Please do. It’s, it’s narratively very important.

[01:00:08] Simone Collins: I, yes. I need-

[01:00:10] Malcolm Collins: I want to show how we win. We win- Well,

[01:00:12] Simone Collins: I was, I was waiting to see how, how it plays out. I need to check in with her. Mm. So I will do so. I will do so.

[01:00:16] Malcolm Collins: And you need to explain to them, ‘cause they’re filming behind her right now, this is RFAB technology we’re using right here.

Oh, yes. We got sick of paying other people.

[01:00:25] Simone Collins: Yes. This is RFAB technology we’re recording on now. Is that good? Did I do it right?

[01:00:33] Malcolm Collins: That was not good at all.

[01:00:35] Simone Collins: No, I’m, I’m like legit really excited about what you built with this, because someone actually just today emailed us about some Chrome plugin that he created after you were like, “Simone, you can’t keep saying this word or that word,” you know, because I was reading the Andrew Tate article quotes that I was- Mm

you know, from the, from that episode on Andrew Tate. And he was like, “Well, I built a Chrome plugin,” which is actually quite clever, “that takes all the naughty to YouTube words and will just switch them to acceptable words just in your browser so that you don’t accidentally read the wrong thing,” which is somewhat clever for, like, all the YouTubers who are trying to self-censor.

But you, like, you did that-

[01:01:12] Malcolm Collins: I created a beep with an Indian head pattern that happens with our editing system ...

[01:01:15] Simone Collins: yeah, where you could just take every single word that is naughty and just replace it immediately with censorship which-

[01:01:21] Malcolm Collins: Which I think is funnier ... I

[01:01:22] Simone Collins: th- I think it’s funnier too. I think that there was this period in the ‘90s when shows just had abundant beeps in them, and they were, like, better than actual bad words.

And I think for a while then sitcoms and other comedies used-

[01:01:35] Malcolm Collins: Well, you know what show is

[01:01:36] Simone Collins: famous for adding- ... the beeps on seamlessly ... random

[01:01:38] Malcolm Collins: beeps to-

[01:01:39] Simone Collins: Yeah, like when it’s not the real word, right?

[01:01:41] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Do you know what show?

[01:01:44] Simone Collins: A bunch of them did it, right? No, there- Which one is famous for it?

[01:01:46] Jerry: No, the, the, there, there’s this show that’s famous for doing it g- because

[01:01:49] Malcolm Collins: the family didn’t cuss- Oh

and they wanted to make them look more like redneck.

[01:01:54] Simone Collins: Okay. Who? What?

[01:01:55] Malcolm Collins: Duck Dynasty.

[01:01:56] Simone Collins: Duck... Are you serious?

[01:01:58] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The real Duck Dynasty family never curses. And so what they would do is they would add beeps to make it look like they were cursing up a storm all the time.

[01:02:05] Simone Collins: Okay. That’s, that’s actually pretty amazing.

Why would they do that?

[01:02:10] Malcolm Collins: Because- Just ‘cause it’s more funny when that’s the thing? ... they’re progressives who have an incredibly bigoted view of conservatives,

[01:02:14] Simone Collins: and

[01:02:15] Malcolm Collins: so-

[01:02:15] Simone Collins: Oh, so they thought they weren’t rednecky enough if they didn’t have potty mouths?

[01:02:18] Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

[01:02:19] Simone Collins: Mm. Wow.

[01:02:20] Malcolm Collins: And, and, and, and normal conservatives are, like, Christians, and so they’re like- Who wouldn’t do that

“No, why would I curse?” Yeah. “I’m not gonna be inappropriate,” right?

[01:02:26] Simone Collins: Wow, okay.

[01:02:27] Malcolm Collins: But they needed to dehumanize them, so you know, you can’t, you can’t have people think, oh, maybe conservatives aren’t, you know...

[01:02:33] Simone Collins: That’s really crazy. That is genuinely crazy. Okay.

[01:02:35] Malcolm Collins: It, it’s wild how long this has been going on, but let’s, let’s get into this, Simone.

You- Yeah ... you found a fun topic for me. Okay.

[01:02:41] Simone Collins: Yeah, separate for, like, not just... So there are two ways that I can introduce this. I can just briefly introduce it, or I could just read, like, slightly edited but the texts that I was sent that made me be like, “What?” Because I was like, “What?” And I feel like maybe that would just be a good enough introduction.

[01:02:57] Malcolm Collins: I think that is a good introduction, and, I think you are a very special person Right And this is the first public podcast, ‘cause somebody’s like, “I’m so glad to see you guys bouncing back.” And I was like we haven’t recorded any since then.”

[01:03:09] Simone Collins: Yeah, well that was from the before times, and that’s why we were so cheerful and bouncy.

But anyway, okay.

[01:03:14] Malcolm Collins: You can see those teary Simone eyes right now,

[01:03:16] Simone Collins: so. Oh, God. Well, you know what? We cry for a lot of reasons, and there were a lot of... Anyway,

What did you want to show me? A video. We have to make a video. You have to make a video. Three, two, one, go. Boogie on it, boogie on it, boogie on it

Baki ani, Baki ani, Baki ani

Okay

What are you [01:04:00] doing?

From Grand Canyon and desert peak accounts to crowded trail TikToks and the wider man-versus-bear conversation, we examine outdoor culture, preparedness, and why solo travel content can paint an unrealistic picture of wilderness risk. The hosts share personal near-misses, national-park safety stats, and practical takeaways on communication, chivalry, and knowing when a hike simply isn’t a good date idea.

Show Notes

The Guardian: Women are being abandoned by their partners on hiking trails. What’s behind ‘alpine divorce’?

“On social media, women describe alpine divorce as going on a hike, climb or other outdoor adventure with a male partner, only to be abandoned or left behind – perhaps he went too fast and neglected to wait, or a fight on the trail resulted in him storming off. Breakups have quickly followed.

In a TikTok with more than 4.2m likes, a woman bawls as she takes shaky steps down a rock formation. “He left me by myself, I should have never come with him,” sobs the woman, who did not respond to a request for comment. Others flooded the comments section with stories about being served with an alpine divorce. One woman described a 12-hour journey out of the Grand Canyon after her boyfriend ditched her, during which she was assisted by a “very nice man from Norway” who carried her backpack. Another described getting lost in the woods after a man left her behind, and immediately blocking his number once she got home.

There’s that male ego element to it that’s not necessarily evil … but it usually has a negative effect on the partner.

Many of the women described having some level of dependence on their partner in nature. They may not have been carrying the right supplies or enough water, or were not familiar with the terrain, making them feel vulnerable.

“It’s such a common thing,” said Julie Ellison, the first female editor-in-chief of Climbing magazine who now works as an outdoor lifestyle photographer. She has heard “so many stories” about men fumbling outdoor dates. “There’s that male ego element to it that’s not necessarily evil or ill-intentioned, but it usually has a negative effect on the partner who’s being left behind.”

A recent case study illustrates this point: last month, an amateur Austrian mountaineer was found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter for leaving his exhausted girlfriend behind on his country’s highest peak while he went in search of help. The man, a Salzburg chef identified only as Thomas P, said he was “endlessly sorry” for her death, and his lawyer called it a “tragic accident”. But Thomas P could not explain why he failed to wrap his freezing girlfriend in her emergency blanket before heading down the mountain without her. Earlier in their trek he had also told a police officer over the phone that they did not need any help, even though a rescue helicopter was made available to them.

A former girlfriend testified that Thomas P had left her behind on a trail during a hike in 2023 – “so that was the last mountain expedition we undertook together”, she said.

Outdoor culture romanticizes pushing your limits and flexing endurance. Folk heroes have been made out of rugged men such as Timothy Treadwell, the environmentalist who was mauled by the grizzly bears he lived alongside, or Christopher McCandless, who eschewed society to live alone in the wild and later died of starvation. “There’s this emphasis on strength, independence and stoicism that is really embedded in the way males are taught to prioritize character traits,” said Doriel Jacov, a New York-based therapist who specializes in relationship patterns. “Masculinity seems to play a role in how alpine divorce manifests in real life.”

A man walking 100ft ahead of his girlfriend because he cannot be bothered to wait for her is bad manners. But failing to properly care for someone in an environment they’re not prepared to handle alone can cause real harm. “I can’t see how leaving someone in a highly unsafe position wouldn’t qualify as an abusive dynamic, especially if [the man] is aware to some degree that that’s what they’re doing,” said Jacov.

Naomi, 46, an educator and member of the Wine Hiking Society, a community organization for women that promotes outdoor exploration and socialization, was not surprised when she saw discussion of alpine divorce on TikTok. “It feels like another version of a #MeToo story to me,” she said. “My response is like, well of course [this happens].”

About 20 years ago, Naomi hit Deseret Peak, an 11,036ft (3,363-metre) mountain close to her home in Salt Lake City, with two friends: another woman and a man who she had a “close” but not romantic relationship with. On the way up, Naomi started to feel disoriented, possibly from altitude sickness. But the man, who was chasing a goal of hiking the highest peak in every county in Utah, did not want to stop. (Naomi requested to use only her first name for the sake of privacy.)

The man and woman left Naomi on the way up. She knew that they would not come back for her because the trail was a loop, and she feared she would pass out. “I felt like I had to crawl on my hands and knees, and finally I made it to the top.”

Naomi eventually stopped hiking with the man. “I realized at some point that every bad thing that would happen to me outside, he was the common denominator,” she said. “I would find myself in sketchy situations that were way outside my comfort zone, which is often a theme in these stories of either being left behind or pushing yourself beyond your limit.”

A few years ago, Naomi was hiking Arches national park in Utah when her group noticed a woman lying on the ground in distress.

The woman told them she suffered from severe vertigo – not ideal given the park’s topography – and her date had gone to retrieve his camera after she accidentally dropped it into the bowl near Delicate Arch. “There was no way she was going to get out by herself, and we hiked with her back down to the trailhead,” Naomi said. On the way, they learned that she was on a “second or third date” with the man. “We were asking her, like, ‘So … this might be the last date, huh?’””

What are people posting on Tiktok?

The most famous one with 5.1M views (WHY IS THIS WOMAN FILMING HERSELF WHILE WALKING DOWN DANGEROUS ROCKS)

• Reads: POV: you go on a hike with him in the mountains but he leaves you alone by yourself and you realize he never liked you to begin with

• As she walks, there are clearly other people on the trail; she is not alone.

Another woman named Lara Marcellin / @thespicypisces444 posted: “PSA ladies never go hiking with a man” with a clip she filmed while she was lost/stranded and trying to find her way.

• She describes stepping briefly off-trail (bathroom), then discovering he was gone

• Iit took her a long time (reports of ~2 hours) to reach the car.

• Multiple millions of views reported; follow-ups discuss the aftermath and trust issues. Covered as another clear example of the same pattern.

There’s one woman who posted a photo of herself with the text “POV you refuse to be the victim of alpine divorce” in which she films herself with her boyfriend on a leash on a hiking trail”

The sister movement of female solo travel

22-year-old Kamryn Renae, aka the “PCT Princess,”went viral while (allegedly) solo thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and has said she funds the trip through OnlyFans.

• Ironically on her non-only fans Instagram, where she has 298K followers, she ended up influencing a lot of young women who got into solo hiking/camping because of her

  • When I looked at her account I found that two women I already follow also follow her

    • And comments are oddly bifurcated

      • On one of her latest posts, which includes photos of her wearing a skin-tight white shirt with no bra that says “I <3> books and sex”, comments are a mix of stuff from women who find her aspirational to men who clearly are there for the OF comment

        • Examples:

          • Laurenashen: How is this diva hiking the entire PCT trail and looking so cute while doing it?? I would look endlessly ugly 😂

          • Oceanpeaches: “(Not trying to be weird) but it genuinely must feel SO NICE to hike without a bra on!!”

          • Ginnicholas: “I have so many questions about your adventures. How do you keep your devices charged. I’m planning a hike of the pct next year and want to create content for my kids and friends do you have any suggestions or pointers”

          • Heteromationprecariat: I took love books, and sex. However, books are easier to come upon.

    • A little concerned about her form of influencing?

    • She hikes in little miniskirts and tight tiny shirts without bras and speaks in a little baby voice and most of her equipment is pink

    • She starts off her days by putting on makeup, painting her nails, etc.

• In a YouTube video titled Kamryn Renae and the Paradox of Outdoor Influencers, Broey Deschanel (a female culture commentator) talks about how Kamryn influenced her to get out more, but wrestles with whether her childlike affect is legit or a contrived persona

  • She also talks about conspiracy theories that she’s not actually hiking the trail solo (instead traveling with a guy), or that she’s possibly staying in hotels at night

Other famous female solo travel influencers:

• Alyssa Ramos (My Life’s a Travel Movie)

• Eva zu Beck, Lexie Alford (Lexie Limitless) (No OF)

• Ciara Johnson (Hey Ciara) (No OF)

• Liz Carlson (Young Adventuress)

There is definitely OF hiking content.

Pro Tip: JUST DON’T

People die hiking. But also, men die more so maybe don’t depend on them?

Men die at far higher rates than women in U.S. National Park Service (NPS) sites. Across multiple years of data, men consistently account for roughly 75–85% of fatalities (most commonly cited around 80%), while women account for the remaining 15–25% of cases where sex is recorded. Visitation is roughly equal by gender.

*in fairness the overall risk remains very low relative to the hundreds of millions of annual recreational visits (e.g., ~0.11 deaths per 100,000 visits in 2019).

How this feels apt

What we have here:

• Couples failing to thrive

• Women going solo

  • But finding a way to still be funded by men

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins:
Hello, Malcolm. I’m so excited to be speaking with you today because we are going to be speaking about men abandoning women on their hikes in this new trend,

Speaker 39:
That’s hilarious.

Simone Collins:
which is actually not so new, called alpine divorce. The term actually comes from an old book, like, written in the eighteen forties or sixties about a man a story about a man who’s gonna take his wife on an alpine hike, and then, you know, she would conveniently tragically die on the hike, and he’d be fine. But instead, at the at the summit of the mansion or whatever, his his wife tells him that, no. Joke’s on him because she’s called the police and said that she’s been murdered or she’s going to be murdered by her husband. And then she she jumps off the cliff, like, minutes before the police arrived that she called or something. So that’s that’s where this name came from. And now we’re gonna see what people think Alpine divorce is now.

Malcolm Collins:
Wait. So what what what did it used to be you said minutes before the police she called about?

Simone Collins:
She jumped off the mountain. So it was a it was a reverse double trick, you see. Oh, she said I’m gonna

Malcolm Collins:
do an alpine divorce? And then No.

Simone Collins:
I think it’s a book called alpine divorce. That’s where the term comes from. Oh. People are calling this trend alpine divorce.

Malcolm Collins:
So it’s about it’s a book about a lady unaliving?

Simone Collins:
Yeah. But in revenge for her husband who planned on murdering her anyway. So That That’s

Malcolm Collins:
doesn’t sound very revengy. Look. Women be weird.

Simone Collins:
Okay? And that’s really what this is about. I saw a couple of days ago, and this is a it’s a trending article by The Guardian about this trend of men abandoning women on their hiking trips. I’m I’m gonna read a little bit of it, not all of it. I I think it’s very amusing. On social media, women describe alpine divorce as going on a hike, climb, or other outdoor adventure with a male partner only to be abandoned or left behind. Perhaps he went too fast and neglected to wait, or a fight on the trail resulted in him storming off. Breakups have quickly followed. In a TikTok with more than 4,200,000 likes, a woman balls as she takes shaky steps down a rock formation. He left me by myself. I should have never come with him, sobs the woman who did not respond to a request for comment. Others flooded the comments.

Malcolm Collins:
Women in the woods die for man. They desperately want men in the oh oh, I a man or a bear in the woods. The moment you leave them alone. How dare he?

Simone Collins:
Actually, what’s really funny is in some of the social media commentary on this very trend, they’re like, this is exactly why I would choose the bear.

Malcolm Collins:
Oh, you what want the man there so much. That’s why you would choose the bear?

Simone Collins:
No. They no. They would choose the bear because you can’t depend on the man is is their conclusion. Men are so unreliable. They’ll just abandon you. I would prefer a bear. A bear is predictable.

Malcolm Collins:
Okay. Go go into this more. Go into this.

Simone Collins:
Others flooded the comment section with stories about being served with an Alpine divorce. One woman described a twelve hour journey out of the Grand Canyon after her boyfriend ditched her during which she was assisted by, quote, a very nice man from Norway, end quote, who carried her backpack. Another scribes getting lost in the woods after a man left her behind and immediately blocking his number once she got home. There’s that male ego element of it’s not necessarily evil, but it usually has a negative effect on the partner. Many of the women described having some level of dependence on their partner in nature. They may not have been carrying the right supplies or enough water or were not familiar with the terrain, making them feel vulnerable. It’s such a common thing.

Malcolm Collins:
Really hearing here is they would go hiking with men that were carrying more than their share of supplies, that were doing more than their share of the work, and all of a sudden, they have to just manage themselves, and

Simone Collins:
they can’t do it. Spoilers, Malcolm. But it’s such a common thing, says Julie Ellison, the first female editor in chief of climbing magazine who now works as an outdoor lifestyle photographer. She has heard, quote, so many stories, end quote, about men fumbling outdoor dates. There’s that male ego element to it that’s not necessarily evil or ill intention, but it usually has a negative effect on a partner who’s being left behind, end quote. A recent case study illustrates this point. Last month, an amateur Austrian mountaineer was found guilty of gross negligence manslaughter for leaving his exhausted girlfriend behind on his country’s highest peak while he went in search of help. The man, a Salzburg chief identified only as Thomas p, said he was endlessly sorry for her death, and his lawyer called it a tragic accident. But Thomas p could not explain why he failed to wrap his freezing girlfriend in her emergency blanket before heading down the mountain without her because apparently she was incapable of anyway, earlier in their trek, he had also told the police officer over the phone that they did not need any help even though a rescue helicopter was made available to them. A former girlfriend testified that Thomas p had left her behind on a trail during a hike in 2023. Quote, so that was the last mountain expedition we undertook together, she said. Outdoor culture romanticization

Malcolm Collins:
kept dating?

Simone Collins:
Yeah. This is really this is it. That’s interesting. Well, I mean, clearly, they didn’t stay long enough together for you know, because there was another girlfriend and then she died. But you know? Wait. What? Yeah. Thomas p abandoned his girlfriend on the highest peak in Austria.

Malcolm Collins:
Oh, and then she died?

Simone Collins:
Yes. That’s I just read a whole paragraph about how he was just found guilty of gross negligence because he abandoned her.

Malcolm Collins:
Do we have reasons why these men keep abandoning these women? Are they literally when these men are their lifelines being that annoying on mountains?

Simone Collins:
One wonders. One wonders. I will I will read those just a little bit more. Outdoor culture romanticizes pushing your limits and flexing endurance. Folk heroes have been made out of rugged men such as Timothy Treadwell, the environmentalist who was mauled by the grizzly bears he lived alongside, or Christopher Christopher McCanless who eschewed society to live alone and in the wild and later die died of starvation. Quote, there’s endless there’s this emphasis on strength, independence, and stoicism that’s really embedded in the way males are taught to prioritize character traits, said Doreal Jakov, a New York based therapist who specializes in relationship patterns. Quote, masculinity seems to play a role in how alpine divorce manifests in real life. A man walking 100 feet ahead of his girlfriend because he can’t be bothered to wait for her is bad manners, but failing to properly care for someone in an environment they’re not prepared to handle alone can cause real harm. Quote, I can’t see how leaving someone in a highly unsafe position wouldn’t qualify as an abusive dynamic, especially if the man is aware to some degree that that’s not that that that’s what they’re doing, says Jakob. Naomi, 46, an educator and member of the wine hiking society, that sounds like a really bad combination.

Malcolm Collins:
I I that does sound like a terrible combination.

Simone Collins:
I can’t Did pick that up the first time I read this? I this is the this is funny thing. Like,

Malcolm Collins:
knows that, you know, if beer and and hunting and beer and fishing go together

Speaker 7:
Each of you youngins take a gun, a beer, and some smokes. Hey. I’ll blow your freaking head off. Hey. Look out, son. That’s dangerous. You’re gonna spill your beer.

Malcolm Collins:
, But the moment I hear wine and hiking

Simone Collins:
Wine hiking. For some reason, my brain immediately but if

Malcolm Collins:
you’re like, let’s have beer and go hunting, I’d

Simone Collins:
be like, yeah. Of course. Yeah. You know, it’s Oh, god.

Malcolm Collins:
But that’s because I associate women with wine maybe or Yeah.

Simone Collins:
Wine calls. Wine. Yeah. Mhmm. Anyway, Wine Hiking Society, a community organization for women that promotes outdoor exploration and socialization, was not surprised when she saw a discussion of alpine divorce on TikTok. Quote, it feels like another version of a me too story to me, she said. My response is like, well, of course, this happens. About twenty years ago, Naomi hit the desert peak, an 11,003 36 foot mountain close to her home in Salt Lake City with two friends, another woman and a man who she had a close but not romantic relationship with. On the way up, Naomi started to feel disoriented, possibly from altitude sickness. But the man who was chasing the goal of hiking the highest peak in every county in Utah did not want to stop. Naomi requested use of only her first name for the sake of privacy. The man and the woman left Naomi on the way up. She knew that they would not come back for her because the trail was a loop, and she feared she would pass out. I felt like I had to crawl on my hands and knees, and I finally made it to the top. Naomi eventually stopped hiking with the man. I realized at some point that every bad thing that would happen to me outside, he was the common denominator, she said.

Malcolm Collins:
Would find myself in sketchy situations that

Simone Collins:
were way outside my comfort zone, which is often a theme in these stories of either being left behind or pushing yourself beyond your limit. These are just women who don’t hike, I think. and you’re gonna see I I think there’s a connection here. A few a few years ago

Malcolm Collins:
These are women who want guys that are out of their legs and fit, and they’re, like, desperately climbing their way up mountains trying to impress them.

Simone Collins:
Oh, it’s very you know, the parent trap. You know, there’s there’s the the rich girlfriend and the hiking disaster where she, like, puts on her, like this is very, like, actually very apropos. She puts on her, like, sexy influencer hiking outfit, and they all go hiking, and she cannot handle it. That is what this is for sure. It’s the parent trap all over again.

Speaker 9:
What’s going on?

Speaker 10:
Here’s what’s going on, buddy.

Simone Collins:
Second one, obviously. That’s the best one. Lindsay Lohan. She was great. She was great. And her new face is fantastic. Anyway, a few years ago, Naomi was hiking in Arches National Park in Utah when her group noticed a woman lying on the ground in distress. Lying on the ground. The woman told them she she suffered from severe vertigo, not ideal given the park’s topography, and her date had gone to retrieve his camera after she accidentally dropped it into the bowl near the delicate arch. Quote, there was no way she was getting out of her by getting out of there by herself, and we hiked with her back down the trailhead, Naomi said. On the way, they learned that she was, quote, on a second date or a third date with the man. We were asking her, so this might be the last date. But, anyway, yeah, I would probably leave my date if they lie down on the ground and dropped my expensive camera inside a very difficult to access natural depression.

Malcolm Collins:
Wait. Why did she lie down on the ground?

Simone Collins:
Because she suffered from severe vertigo. She she was scared of heights, which you can relate to. I can relate to that, but then don’t go hiking. I’ve never seen you bamf out of a place as fast to that one water slide. The one where

Malcolm Collins:
they just, like, drop you. You’ve forced me on dangerous hikes before. I know exactly what this is like.

Simone Collins:
It’s true. You came this close to Alpine divorcing me. No. I came this close to Alpine, like, literally the original Alpine divorce. Don’t you remember how I almost died?

Malcolm Collins:
Yes. Because I freaking tell you. That’s why we

Simone Collins:
don’t hike anymore because I said you’re gonna die, Simone. Yeah. And it wasn’t because, like, of a lack of stamina. It’s because I’m very clumsy, and I was standing right next to because I don’t suffer from severe photocopying.

Malcolm Collins:
I do not have a good time. About sinful behavior. I I consider, hiking, like, super sinful It is way too easy to die while hiking. Not Yeah. All hiking. Like, if you’re in a general whatever place, but if you’re doing the type of hiking where if you slip, it means you die. Like, what a selfish thing to do.

Simone Collins:
Well and actually so I’m gonna send you to the the OG of this this TikTok, the of the woman that went viral. The the the Guardian articles, she had, like, said she had 4,000,000 views and now has, like, over 5,000,000 views. Watch this. And you’ll see just how irresponsible and sinful she’s being, because she’s literally holding her camera and, like, crying as she’s, like, going down up a fairly difficult to navigate section of rocky terrain. And, like, lady, please don’t you gotta the way she’s gonna navigate this is

Speaker 5:
I know I’m walking alone in his shoes. Can’t let me. I’m Barbie. So nervous. I never came with him. You think about it. Anytime you think about it. You know, do not go. I hate it so much. I feel so terrible. Like, this is the worst Saturday of my life. I could’ve been at home. I could’ve been a break out of my house.

Speaker 12:
That’s hilarious. Hey, I ought to be a stand up.

Malcolm Collins:
Did she need a man to tell her to not farm sympathy like this? Like

Simone Collins:
Well, no. I mean, I think she needed a man to tell her to, like, use all fours if you’re going down a very steep and rocky part of terrain. Like, do not do not walk with two feet holding your phone while sobbing for TikTok. Now keep in mind, she also talks about being abandoned in this video. At the end of the clip, the viral OG alpine divorce TikTok clip, there are just these people walking toward her on the trail. She’s not alone. These are, like, very popular busy trails. She’s not isolated. She can ask for help. Like, this is not

Malcolm Collins:
Oh, and something I would want to, you know, really signal for fans, a trail being popular doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. Oh, no. That’s what

Simone Collins:
I’m worried about most, and we’re gonna get to that too. Yeah. It that is yeah. We’ll get we’ll get to that. Anyway, I’m gonna send you another one that went super viral. This is by a woman who goes by Laura Marcellin, aka the spicy Pisces four four four, which is a delightful name. Saying, PSA, ladies, never go hiking with a man. And she just is kind of, like, wandering through, like, what looks like English Moorland ish. It’s just kind of gray and indistinct.

Speaker 4:
Road trip. Never go hiking with a man. Never go hiking with a man. They basically just stranded me. I don’t even know where the fuck I am. I don’t know where I’m going. I I’m just following a path. I don’t even know if this is the right path. There’s so many, but we walked for at least two hours to get here. So at least I’ve had another two hours back.

Speaker 24:
That’s hilarious. Hey, I ought to be a stand up.

Simone Collins:
And she they they’d hiked two hours out, and she went to go to the bathroom. And then her boyfriend was gone, and so she died two miles or two hours back to get there. And she did all these follow-up videos in the aftermath to discuss her trust issues. And And why did he leave? Nobody knows.

Malcolm Collins:
Could they explain? These women must be so annoying for a guy to just

Simone Collins:
walk off on life. To wonder, like, to what extent, you know, are these women with borderline personality disorder who are engaging in severely toxic behavior where the men are just like, I I will push you off the mountain if we stay together, so I’m going to walk away. You know? Sometimes it’s just best to deescalate. You know? Like, if you if you can’t help but, like, do something violent, you need to walk away sometimes. And I sometimes wonder if that what is what happened here. I mean, obviously, it is a super not okay thing to take someone on a hiking or camping experience if they lack the necessary experience, equipment, or health to complete that trip safely. And I think it’s it’s not cool for guys to do this. I think that in general, like, your whole point, this is hiking is sinful. It just don’t hike. And, also, a lot of people die in national parks every year, like, USA national parks. But even though men and women visit them at about the same rate, guess who dies a lot more? Really? Do women die more in Park City? Around eighty plus percent of the people who die in national parks, even though men and women visit at the same rates, are men. Oh, really? Men are also just way more likely to be super reckless in national parks. And, like, yeah, maybe also, like, don’t don’t trust a man to, like, calibrate properly because men are also way more likely to end up scrubbing out themselves in the middle of some kind of nature adventure. It’s just not it’s not the best idea. But what’s really interesting to me about this is the sister movement of female solo travel, and especially this 22 year old named Cameron Renee who also goes as the PCT princess who went viral while allegedly solo hiking through the Pacific Crest Trail. And she has said that she funds her trip through OnlyFans, and I 100% believe it, and you’ll understand why. Ironically, though, her non OnlyFans Instagram, where she has 298,000 followers, actually influences a lot of young women to get into solo hiking and camping. And a lot of it’s because she we she’ll post her her backpacking hiking routine, and she gets it up in the morning in her little pink tent. And she puts on her tiny little skintight shirt without her bra on and her tiny little skintight miniskirt. And she does her makeup, and she does her nails, and

Malcolm Collins:
she does hair. See this and they think, I want that?

Simone Collins:
Yeah. Looks okay. So, like, on a recent post, like, her second to most recent post where which includes photos of her, by the way, wearing a skin tight white shirt with no bra that if I just, like, Photoshop colored it, like, skin color, she would look naked. Like, I can see every I can see everything. And those this shirt says, I heart books and sex with a little frog on it. And so cute. And the comments on it, I thought would just be, like, only from her male OnlyFans followers. I was like, well, clearly, like, this account can only be followed. No. It is one, when I clicked over to her account, two of the female accounts that I follow on Instagram were following her. Probably I mean, assuming unironically. Also, the the the YouTuber, like, social commentator, Burry Deschanel, also did a whole video on her and talked about how she has encouraged her to get out more. So this woman is influencing other women to solo travel. And so I’m looking at the comments of this, like, clearly OnlyFans bait photo post. and we have Lauren Shannon saying, how is this diva hiking the entire PCT Trail and looking so cute while doing it? I was, like, endlessly ugly. And ocean peaches says, not trying to be weird, but it genuinely must feel so nice to hike without a bra on. Like, they’re not getting it. Ginny Nicholas says, I have so many questions about your adventures. How do you keep your devices charged? I’m planning to hike the PCT next year and want to create content for my kids and friends. Do you have any suggestions or pointers? So she she’s also getting, like, women excited to go out and, like, film themselves hiking solo across this trail. Meanwhile, Brody Deschanel says that she surfaced a lot of conjecture on the lore of this this creator that a lot of people think she’s not actually hiking the trail, that she’s staying in a motel at night, that she is a man with her the whole time who’s also helping her film things. So this may not even be what a lot of people think it is. And, also, there are totally, like, her male audience on Instagram. Like, hetero mation precariat says, I too love books and sex. However, books are easier to come upon. I’ll just leave you with that. Wait. Wait.

Malcolm Collins:
Wait. Who who wrote that where? That’s one of

Simone Collins:
the comments on her look. I’m gonna send you her just go here’s her Instagram, and you can tell me if you I’m just so surprised that that women follow this because it honestly made me a little uncomfortable. I was like, oh, girl. Like, are you safe out there? And, also, like, this is extremely explicit for, like, Instagram. Maybe I’m on the wrong part of Instagram. All my stuff’s like recipes and seasonal stuff. So look at her second post, and look at her shirt.

Malcolm Collins:
Okay. I’ll look at her second post. Okay. The I love books, oh, and sex.

Simone Collins:
You can see everything.

Malcolm Collins:
And then, yeah, makes a stupid a face. Why would anybody make that face?

Simone Collins:
And then she has another photo of an ant on her hand intermixed with photos of her her her headlights blinking brightly through a yellow lace lined shirt. And

Malcolm Collins:
shot. Gross.

Simone Collins:
I know. Doesn’t it make you feel gross looking at it? But, like, women are following this. Look. If you look like a couple posts over, it’s like her lying down provocatively on her her little yellow sleeping bag on top of her pink tarp. It’s very and I’m not gonna ask you to married get and have kids. Like, didn’t She’s 22 years old. You know, that’s, you know That’s a little old. Baby for, like, our time, but, obviously, it’s a great time to get married. Anyway, when if you were to watch her videos, what’s also kind of creepy about it is she does everything in a sexy baby voice and kind of acts like this, like, like a little girl. And it is actually quite dangerous as a as a solo female hiking in isolated areas to travel like this because you don’t know who’s out there. I mean, I’m sure she keeps pepper spray with her and probably bear spray. I don’t know if that trail has bears on it, but I would keep bear spray with me anyway. But, like, that’s not it’s not it’s not it is very risky to travel alone, especially in the wilderness where no one can hear you scream, presumably. Dress like a prostitute? Dress like a well Dress like bait, as you would No. Like, literally dress like bait. And I’m sure she, like, delays her posts and stuff, but now she’s inspiring other young women to go out and hike this trail. Well, you’re being

Malcolm Collins:
a a big girl should wanna meet a bear rather than a man in the woods. Right? You

Simone Collins:
know? No. Honestly, like, I hope she finds the bear. Not the man. Not the man. Very concerned. I really do hope she she travels with a man.

Speaker 26:
Apparently, she ended up having to be airlifted to a hospital.

Simone Collins:
But but there there is a ton of sort of reactionary content to the Alpine divorce discussion that’s taking place, the discourse. Like, one woman on TikTok instead text to or, like, made a video where she put the text over it saying, POV, you refuse to be the victim of alpine divorce in which she films herself with her boyfriend on a leash on a hiking trail. So some women are li

Speaker 3:
When you’re mine in the world, there’s gonna be one less lonely girl. One less lonely girl. One less lonely girl.

Simone Collins:
ke, well, I have control over my boyfriend, whereas other women are just going solo saying they hope they find the bear. And then also, like, low key, still still basically using men to support their travel, but by posting sexy photos. And while I I did find some other really prominent female solo travel influencers, they don’t seem to have OnlyFans. I did create just for this an OnlyFans account and searched hiking. And lo and behold, there is a ton of hiking content. We’ve got didn’t you create your OnlyFans account in another episode? Oh god. How many OnlyFans accounts do I have now? This is unfortunate. I think I might have deleted it, so that’s why I had to do it. Isla Moon who’s swimming in the jungle. And we have Tiffany Tyme, who kicks off her Iceland adventures.

Malcolm Collins:
Oh my god.

Simone Collins:
They’re all wearing, like, no bra and a tight white T shirt. Exploring Point Doom. Exploring beautiful British Columbia. They look like travel shows, but, like, with tits. It’s it’s actually quite funny. But, yeah, I I just find it very ironic that we have this world in which men are abandoning women on hiking trails, but also then women are, like, going out there and, like, managing to combine essentially forms of prostitution, I guess you could argue, with hiking by themselves putting themselves at nontrivial risk doing so. It’s I think we need to yeah. I think society maybe needs some adjustment. I I just find this very interesting, and I would I would encourage people to not to not hike. Or if they have to, then don’t don’t drink and hike. No wine. But, yeah, I’m glad we stay inside. Thanks, Malcolm.

Malcolm Collins:
That that we don’t yeah. Well, so sort of my meta on this Mhmm. Is a few things.

Simone Collins:
Okay.

Malcolm Collins:
Hiking as a date to me feels crazy.

Simone Collins:
Like That is yeah. That’s, murder material. It’s well, I mean, also, if someone invites you on a boat, that’s how you really know you’re screwed.

Malcolm Collins:
Like, there’s I I understand how, like, you’re signaling a certain thing about, you know, your outdoorsy, whatever you’re looking for, the right kind of outdoorsy person. And but I’ve done some date hikes before. I I’ve never had a good date hike.

Simone Collins:
Because you don’t like that.

Malcolm Collins:
They’re always, like, too hot or uncomfortable or whatever. Right? Like, they’re they’re not fun. And they’re often very dangerous, like, hiking, which I think people under undersell. Outside of date hiking what’s my second thought on this?

Simone Collins:
Must be the man I mean, obviously, the the Austrian who just left his girlfriend after refusing a helicopter pickup, I mean, she would have paid. It’s not like he’d be paying for it. I don’t know why. Like, that was gross negligence. I I get it. Like, the court the court was correct on that one, I think. But, like, other guys just leaving their girlfriends behind. I could also imagine

Malcolm Collins:
So the the helicopter offer was before he left her?

Simone Collins:
Yeah. He was on the the phone with a policeman before he left her and refused a helicopter pickup.

Malcolm Collins:
Oh, wait. So she was that, like, out of shape?

Simone Collins:
He was not well. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:
Yeah. Just like, I’m gonna just stay here and then well, that doesn’t sound so bad anymore because then you could say, well, I’m going down to get help or I’m going down to

Simone Collins:
Yeah. I think that was different from Alpine Divorce because that that sounds more like those Everest disaster stories where Yeah. That you know, people get left behind because it’s getting kinda rough. You know? Now you have to make a call. But I still think he made the wrong call. He should have called the helicopter. Still, these other cases, I kinda get the impression that one like, the the the two viral clips that are actually out there, because there aren’t that many, ultimately. Some women talk about it, is I think that, like, the these are instances that are not necessarily very close people. Sometimes they’re in groups. Sometimes they’re not in exclusive relationships, and they’re like, yeah. Let’s go hiking. And I think that it’s mostly women overplaying that they’re like, oh, go ahead. I’ll catch up with you later. And, you know, they’re not really that in shape, and they’re having a tough time. And they may not be the most pleasant people in the world, so the people don’t wanna hang around. Even you hate walking with me because I’m so freaking slow. So, like, I know what this is like. And then they act all angry when it takes them forever to catch up or, you know, when they have to walk back by themselves because, you know, they walk super slow. But I I don’t really think this is some kind of new trend about men being super wrong, but it is unchivalrous. Like, if you’re gonna bother to take a woman on a hike, that could be, if you actually cared about the woman, like, your chance to be Mhmm. Her hero, you know, to piggy her piggyback her home or something.

Malcolm Collins:
Immediately find out what a whiny

Simone Collins:
Well, which I guess you could say is kind of productive. I mean, this might

Malcolm Collins:
be I I guess the type of woman who starts crying into TikTok the moment she gets left behind. It’s exactly the type of woman who gets left behind.

Simone Collins:
Bullet dodged. Yeah. Well, no. Also wonder have you found any pronunciation?

Malcolm Collins:
And ask AI if you can find any posts on this where a guy explains why he left a girl in an Alpine divorce. Like, are these planned by the guys, or are

Simone Collins:
Oh, they’re not planned.

Malcolm Collins:
No. Like, the guy gets fed up or slightly bored.

Simone Collins:
Okay. Yes. There are documented cases in which men involved later gave explanations in court interviews or as reported by the women. Notable examples, Thomas p, who we discussed, that’s the Austrian. He’s he explained that they agreed he should go ahead and seek help because they could not survive the night together. She allegedly urged him, go now. Go. He believed an earlier phone call had already started the rescue process. The court rejected these explanations as adequate, convinced him of or convicted him of gross negligence and manslaughter, and noted his far greater experience and failures to properly communicate the emergency or stay with her. An ex girlfriend also testified that he’d previously left her on the same mountain because she was too slow. And then there’s Jeremy. Jeremy. Machu Picchu Trek 2020 reported in the cut. He left his girlfriend behind on a multi day high altitude hike. Oh my god. I wonder if they did the Rainbow Trail. he later explained that he had repeatedly told her to train, hit the gym beforehand, and she made excuses. On the trail, she was complaining, panting, and miserable. And he decided, quote, I just don’t give up. You know? if you’re going to be miserable back there, I’m just not going to be a part of it. He left her lack of preparation or he felt her lack of preparation was self inflicted and should not ruin his experience. They were in a guided tour group with someone bringing up the rear, so he considered her physically safe. He said he probably would have done the same even if they’d been alone. Oh god. That’s amazing. And then the woman who went viral who also filmed herself going down rocks when she should have been holding on harder, According to her account, the primary source for this wildly discussed case, the man said at the time that he wanted to run ahead to reach the summit before the other hikers on the trail. They became separated that way. After she made it down and they reunited, his reported reaction showed little empathy, including a comment about her brainwashing herself with affirmations. No independent public statement from him appears to have surfaced. I feel like she explained herself. She told on herself just fine other reported patterns. In many women’s accounts and online discussions, the men offered real time or later rationalization such as different paces. She was too slow. Well, you can relate. Can’t you, Malcolm? This is not a woman man thing, though. Your mom walked like she was, I don’t know, like, hooking it to a delicious buffet. I that she really could walk. Wanting to push hard or reach the goal quickly, not realizing or claiming not to realize that separating was a problem. And in one Australian case oh, she was in Australia. I thought she was in some English Moors. This is the spicy Pisces four four four. The man later said he didn’t realize he couldn’t go off on his own and claimed she would not have survived alone in the wild. Oh, she claimed she wouldn’t have survived alone. Well, it is Australia. I mean, now that I know it was Australia, I don’t want anyone I don’t wanna be out there in Australia. My god. Anyway. Yeah, I think a lot of it comes to poor communication and mismatched expectations. But, yeah, that’s I love I love her her hiking companion, the original woman’s hiking companion being like, look. You’re brainwashing yourself into thinking this was a situation that you didn’t totally buy into. I told you I was going ahead. And, yeah, that trail was like I I I given how how little she walked before coming across another hiker, I I think it’s pretty obvious that the trail was crowded at that point, and the guy just wanted to beat the traffic essentially to get to the top. Because it it sucks. If you’re on a kind of narrow and it it was clearly a high incline that they were hiking on. You do not wanna be stuck behind slow people trying to climb to the top, like,

Malcolm Collins:
start to see dangerous in some parts. It’s be be

Simone Collins:
Well, yeah, you don’t wanna be behind someone, like, that looks unstable and, like, could fall over. So I totally get him. Like, I would be in the same position. With a whiner the

Malcolm Collins:
whole time. Just a lever to die on the mountain.

Simone Collins:
Time. Yeah. Look. You’re still a pretty good hiker. You made it to the top of that summit wearing fairy goblins. That was so funny. We we made a mistake. We made a mistake in in Aspen. And some people were like, oh, this is a nice trail. And we’re like, this is awful steep. What’s going on?

Malcolm Collins:
Yeah. Stay away from the steep trails. In addition to staying away from steep trails, stay away from steep roads. Too dangerous. Oh, yeah. I don’t even think you should live in an area with steep roads. I think it’s

Simone Collins:
too Someone was once took us on, like, a, like, a little car tour on a family vacation. And the driver was like, now we’re gonna go on, like, this portion. I’ve never seen someone do this on, like, a tour before. But Malcolm was just like, no. You’re not. We’re not going there. Like, you just you just completely nixed, like, three hours of an entire tour, and you’re just

Malcolm Collins:
like, nope. I will not put myself in a situation where I could randomly die for a simple three hour car tour.

Simone Collins:
Honestly, you probably would’ve had a stroke or, like, a heart attack had we had we done that anyway because you’re super freaking afraid of heights. What was that road called?

Malcolm Collins:
I don’t remember. The Road Of Death or something?

Simone Collins:
I think it I think I really do think it was called something like the Road Of Death. Hold hold on. Was in Telluride. People die on it all the time. Because, yeah, it was your mom, dude. There are just

Malcolm Collins:
so many dangerous things that people do without thinking about how dangerous they are.

Simone Collins:
Yeah. And you’d be like, well, I’ll go. And I’m

Malcolm Collins:
like, no. You will not, Simone. I’m not having the the wife and mom of my kids put in a dangerous situation like that.

Simone Collins:
Yeah. Fair enough. Super fair. I think Oh, yeah. It would have been four hours.

Malcolm Collins:
Don’t think about how dangerous dangerous things they do are.

Simone Collins:
Yeah. I I think that’s I think that’s very true. Like, same thing with the the whole we we were another and this was the most luxurious family vacation I’ve you know, we’ve it was someone’s, like, blowout birthday. They had a lot of money, so they did a luxury safari, and we were invited. It was it was humbling. It was amazing. It was one of the coolest trips ever. Not most fun, but coolest and most luxurious. And, like, Malcolm kept asking as we’re, like, in these open jeeps next to lions and cheetahs and elephants and and hippos. Like, hey. How do they I mean, what keeps us safe from these wild animals that are famous for killing humans? They’re like, look. They’re they’re habituated to the vehicles. Like, they basically don’t see them. And we’re like, I don’t know about that. And then at one at one point, this elephant, like, rushes our car in the darkness, And we knew that we were in actual danger because immediately, the driver, like, cuts the vehicle and is like, no. Actually, shut off right now. And he looked so freaking scared. And as soon as we got back, he, like, ran to the staff section. And then later at the end of the trip, there was, like, a dinner where we got to hang out with more of the staff. And I think, Malcolm, you had asked them. You’re like, no. But really, like, is no one hurt by the animals? And they’re like, oh, yeah. Last week, our friend was killed by a lion because, like, tourists wanted to get a better look or something. And it’s just like, wait. Just like last week, your friend was just killed by a like, no. People die all the freaking time.

Malcolm Collins:
Yeah.

Simone Collins:
And it’s just it’s just a matter of, like, well, if the industry is lucrative enough, people will like, they’ll take you there. Like, peep a Sherpa will take you to the top of Everest because you pay them. You know, someone’s gonna drive you on an incredibly dangerous cliffside road because you pay them. Someone will take you on a safari, surround you with dangerous wild animals. They can they can trample you or hurt you at any point because you pay them. Like, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna survive this. In fact, I think recently in Yellowstone, there there was one or two instances of in one of the big, like, guy or, like, it’s it’s one of those volcanic hot pools, like, really hot, like, in really hot pools where they found a shoe with someone’s foot inside it. Just not great. Yeah. Like, just just don’t. There You there’s so many things you could

Malcolm Collins:
do that won’t get you immediately killed.

Simone Collins:
Yeah. Just don’t. And, also, like, I think people think about, oh, well, skydiving. Like, I think probably the stats on skydiving are just talking about skydiving accidents, like the parachute not opening properly when they’re not talking about the rate of accidents in those super rickety planes. Like, I remember when I went skydiving, I was like, oh, I’m gonna die in this plane. Like, this oh, I thought about the skydiving part, but I didn’t think about the plane part because they are, like, held together literally with tape, which is disturbing. So it’s very true. It’s very true. But, anyway, I I I think the most disturbing thing about this isn’t abandoning women on hiking trips. I’m most concerned about women getting this very skewed perspective about what female solo travel is like from influencers, again, who will make it look good because they get money for it. But in the end, like, it’s not a good idea to wear a white T shirt and no bra or just honestly to, like, hike alone as a female at all. Right? But to do so, as you say, literally dressed like bait is worrisome.

Malcolm Collins:
Oh, look. It’s bait.

Simone Collins:
Yeah. Anyway, I hope she posted all of those videos and stuff after she finished hiking the trail because I’m sure I mean, she has a lot of followers on

Malcolm Collins:
this I mean, I I don’t think women also realize how much more dangerous our countries are getting as you’re letting in. Because I I could say that try going to Egypt and dressing like this. You know? Yeah. Don’t. Yeah. You you are gonna get so if you if you dress like this or or to need

Simone Collins:
to don’t. Like, eve and even if someone doesn’t attack you, like, even if you’re in a very crowded place and you’re not isolated and alone. Like, when your mom took her friends to Marrakesh on that trip, and she warned them about, like, dressing reasonably, but they didn’t. And then that one of her friends got spit on, like, just at one of them are And

Malcolm Collins:
and and that’s, like, obviously not the worst that could happen.

Simone Collins:
No. That’s that’s the best that could happen. Yeah. Like, honestly. But, like, you you don’t want that experience.

Malcolm Collins:
So just But the the point I’m making is is now those people exist in our national parks.

Simone Collins:
Well, I don’t know if they’re in our national

Malcolm Collins:
national

Simone Collins:
They they go to national parks? Egyptians camp too. We’re not we’re not singling out Egyptians. Or what do you call someone from Morocco? Moroccans, obviously. Okay. Sorry. I was thinking Marrakesh. Marrakeshians.

Malcolm Collins:
Marrakeshians? What’s that what’s that place we we signal out all the time because of fraud? That’s probably a better example. India? No. In Africa. East Africa.

Simone Collins:
Of this Somalia. Somalia. Somalia. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:
You dress like that in Somalia.

Simone Collins:
Oh. Let’s see. Yeah. Nigeria isn’t there’s, like, the scammy part, and then there’s, like, the really, really awesome part or so I’m told by this one Nigerian YouTuber who, like, really hates some Nigerians but thinks that, like, his group is the best.

Malcolm Collins:
I mean, Nigerian immigrants are not particularly known for scams or anything like that.

Simone Collins:
No. They’re among, like, the top performers. Yeah. I I think it’s it’s very similar with, like, Brahmin Indian tech workers where, like, it gives this very skewed perspective of the entire nation because you get, like, some of the brightest and wealthiest people coming to certain sectors. But I think that shifts depending on what the industry is, like, where the sort of family cohorts are are forming and stuff. I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s yeah. Anyway, look. If you’re into ladies who like hiking and you wanna like, OF has a lot of stuff for you there. So that’s great. I don’t know if it’s, like, more popular than other genres. I’m sure if I searched, like, video game, it would give me a billion results. But yeah. What I see what I see happening overall with this discourse is this just being another angle by which women are basically speciating from men. Women are like, look. You can’t you can’t hike with a man. You should do everything yourself. It’s it’s it’s a reinforcement. You think that the the the man versus bear meme would have severed by now, but this is, like, man versus bear redux of, no. But, really, here’s more proof that we should choose the bear. Men will leave you in the middle of nowhere. And, yeah, I I we’re in a we’re in a difficult position. People have requested that we do a full on, like, detailed episode on, like, how to win over a young leftist woman because I think they want, like Dress up

Malcolm Collins:
as a bear and go in the woods.

Simone Collins:
Or a man, a basket. Be a basket. Yeah. Maybe we’ll do that. I I don’t know. Chime in in the comments if you actually want us to because Okay. We can actually get tactical. I just feel like it’s gonna be really boring because it it kind of is. I’m sure it was desperately boring for you. So sorry.

Malcolm Collins:
So which episode do wanna run tomorrow? This one or the one before it?

Simone Collins:
God. I really love the one before it. Okay.

Malcolm Collins:
You had fun talking about Wicker Man and female gooders?

Simone Collins:
I do not. For the record, I really don’t wanna watch Wicker. I saw that preview, and I my face matched yours the first time I watched it. I was like, no. No. I mean, like, half the comments on the preview on YouTube were just like the splinters. No. But, anyway, I’m I’m very entertained by the whole thing. So, yeah, I think we should do that one. How? God.

Malcolm Collins:
The scratches?

Simone Collins:
Yeah. I can’t touch that part of my

Malcolm Collins:
skin. By yeah. You gotta migrate him to be part of the goof patrol. He’s growing too fast. He’s too mobile.

Simone Collins:
Monster. The teeth, the claws. Maybe we have a werewolf, son. What is this? Gonna get, like, bitten to death.

Malcolm Collins:
Imagine when he joins the other kids in the fights that they all wanna have.

Simone Collins:
Yeah. Except, like I don’t know. Our our kids know how to play gentle, and he doesn’t yet. So I don’t know. I’m a little I’m a little concerned. But Indy freaking loves him. They all love him so much. Yeah. They should play together. They had sex with babying him and feeding him. And Oh my god.

Malcolm Collins:
They’ll need a little caretaker.

Simone Collins:
Yeah. Oh, okay. Oh, they’re gonna be home tomorrow, so we can do that. But yeah. Okay. Alright. I’m making a mistake tonight. Yeah? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins:
And just heating up the queso from yesterday.

Simone Collins:
Steak and queso? Oh, that’s heat up

Malcolm Collins:
more than the queso we already have.

Simone Collins:
Oh, okay. I will then. I have a lot of queso. What? But I have two things at stake. I have a lot of queso. I know. We can figure out various things we can do with it, I’m sure.

Malcolm Collins:
Of course, we can. And it I’m I’m sure it’ll hold for a while too.

Simone Collins:
The cheese sauce. What could possibly go wrong? Well, probably a lot of thing. I don’t you know what? We’re not gonna think about it. I love you. And

Malcolm Collins:
Love you too. Ciao.

Simone Collins:
When you take pills, you act like you’re gonna die. I, like, worry about you every time. You

Malcolm Collins:
have no idea how bad they taste if they go down wrong.

Simone Collins:
And you like Yeah. I know those pills. No. So here’s what you do. Okay? Because I I, yeah, I I I just had to take a round of pills like that. You you fill your mouth with, in this case, milk. You could do water. Right? And then you leave the water in your mouth, heads up like this, drop the pill in, swallow. It goes in with the liquid. It never touches your tongue or anything in your mouth, and it goes down with the gulp. So you’re not getting it, like, any any remnant of it. Try it next time. Because the the medrol dose pack I had to take for the the two IVF rounds was like, ugh. It was bitter. It was super bitter, but it that worked like a charm. So just a just a thought. Just a thought. Pro tip. This is a this is an upset about pro tips. I’ll get right into it. You ready? Now that you’ve been through your travails of taking one pill.

Malcolm Collins:
Alpine divorce I’m learning about now.

Simone Collins:
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 27:
Side note, we have finally added music video generation to rfab.ai, but it’s still in its alpha stage. If you’re unfamiliar with rfab.ai, it will be pinned in the top comment. It is where this video was made and edited. It was used to generate cool effects in this video, like the Japanese woman’s voice you heard earlier. And it’s the best place online for safe for work and not safe for work AI interactive stories, allowing you to explore virtual worlds, make videos, make art, translate documents, search every fiction database at once online or every non safe for work database at once online. You can find, again, a link in the pinned comment. Oh, and we have been improving our based AI system, so which is the system that can answer any question without political bias. Very advanced AI model that is completely honest, and we’ve had to use it for a few episodes to do research. And now it has stuff like audio to audio mode, so you can use it from your phone without needing to push buttons if you want or a push to talk button or a button that you can enable to let it give you images when it wants to. This is all alpha, not all tested yet, so I’m excited to see how it works. With the song coming up, it’s one of our older songs. So, obviously, it’s, you know, played in front of the kids. And one of my boys, as I’d mentioned, they came up, and they looked very concerned. And they go, daddy, why did mommy choose a bear?

Speaker 25:
In the woods so deep and dark, Simone walks alone at night. She meets a random grizzly grizzly there under pale moonlight. The man might talk, might charm, might lie, might cause a fright, but the bear just roars and hugs real tight. What a lovely sight. Oh, Simone. Oh, Simone. You chose the bear over every man out there without a care. You’ll replace the guys with paws and fur so fine. Simone’s got a new love story. First, I’m Valentine. Malcolm asked why pick the beast. He’s we’ll ir to own. You’ll trade the patriarchy for a furry friend. Simone’s new boyfriend’s got four legs in the air. Now Malcolm’s left to wonder why she sides with claws and teeth while he’s out here defending men grinding his teeth beneath. She’ll picnic with the big old brood chair salmon from the stream and whisper you’re more predictable than any man’s bad dream. Maybe one day she’ll come back home with bear hugs for the crew. But till then, she’s dancing wild where the tall pines grew. Malcolm sings this silly tune, half laughing, half in fear. My wife’s replaced all humankind with one big fuzzy dear, oh, Simone. Oh, Simone, you chose the bear.

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They read the original Kiwi Farms post, then fact-check it. Izzat is a real, documented concept of collective family/clan honor. It is not practiced by all Indians. It is concentrated among many Hindi and Muslim communities in the north and is a poor fit for Jain, Christian, and Buddhist communities. Admitting fault can be treated as humiliating the whole group. Disputes can escalate past the original slight. Police and officials sometimes avoid taking sides. Honor killings are the part the original post underplayed: UNFPA and NGO estimates put worldwide honor killings in the thousands per year, and peer-reviewed work ties izzat to those cases in India and Pakistan. The 2017 Delhi toilet/urination murder they cite is a real case.

They also cover jugaad (workaround culture that can mean frugal innovation or cheating the rule), H-1B co-ethnic hiring and the Cognizant discrimination findings, Air India training scandals, and why a high-performing Indian diaspora can coexist with a country that still struggles with public goods and trust. Malcolm’s secondary explanation: License Raj and the post-independence decision to treat British rule as synonymous with capitalism.

Firsthand: their travel business had clients from many countries. Indian sub-agencies, they say, repeatedly broke vendor contracts, hid large bills, and scammed end customers—including after second chances. They live in a majority-Indian neighborhood and like their neighbors. The argument is about norms and selection, not “all Indians.”

They close by comparing this to Africans, Chinese, and Indians criticizing Western individualism and hookup culture, and by arguing that slapping “racist” on a pattern debate makes the backlash worse (Streisand effect), especially after Canada’s diploma-mill wave.

Weekend episodes and citations: Patreon / Substack.

Books: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FMWMFTG

Show Notes

The Izaat Post

On November 2nd, 2025, @XJosh posted three recent Kiwifarms screenshots to X, saying: Kiwi Farms user breaks down ‘Izzat’, the Indian subcontinent’s cultural honor system. It effectively explains every single trope about Indian behavior: they all participate in an invisible clout-chasing game that involves screwing over everyone as much as possible. Worth the read

The screenshots, showing a post by GluttonousManSlob read:

Hi. I didn’t see this term mentioned in the thread, so I wanted to share this all with you. It’s about Izzat. Some posts have mentioned ‘saving face’, which is Izzat, but I wanted to elaborate on it.

Izzat has no direct translation into English. We only have terms that can broach the same concept such as ‘honour’ or ‘reputation’ or ‘face’. Izzat is so much more than that. It’s a zero-sum game of collective honour shared by whole groups of people, all of whom take it very, very seriously. A system like this isn’t just foreign to Enlightenment values, but I’d argue it’s antithetical to every sensible form of governance on the planet. It will destroy any system that assumes good faith.

Izzat conflicts are not about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about who wins and who loses. This means it’s a zero-sum game where just about any action is justified (including murder) to restore the lost Izzat. Izzat is a limited social currency and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else. Winning is righteous in Izzat. Losing is unrighteous. This means that if someone plays the game of izzat well enough, they can get away with just about anything (murder, rape, scamming, cheating, stealing). The only morality in Izzat is the protection of your group’s collective ego. The only appropriate response when your Izzat is attacked is the complete destruction of whoever insulted it.

Two people get into an argument. They might escalate, but chances are it won’t be that bad. i.e. ‘Sorry I broke your garden gnome.’ With two Indians in an argument, the stakes are always deadly thanks to Izzat. Neither of them can back down, nor can they admit fault. Admitting fault is seen as deliberately humiliating yourself. Not only that, but because Izzat is shared, you are shaming everyone who shares your Izzat. So, admitting fault or taking responsibility for a problem is a form of social suicide. This means even if the dispute was over something completely fucking stupid or trivial (like a broken garden gnome), it could spiral into a decades long honour feud.

Izzat is also the reason why police are reluctant to get involved in disputes. Because Izzat is a zero-sum game, all participants are involved in the game. If a policeman sides with one family over another in an Izzat dispute, this means that he’s deliberately taking the side of that family and dishonouring the other. This marks him for retribution by the offending party. Without parties being able to be impartial, then centralized authority cannot effectively function.

Let’s say someone in India complains about a broken water pipe. Instead of the problem being addressed, the official responsible for the water pipe denies it’s a problem and counterattacks him instead, because daring to question his efficacy in his role was challenging his Izzat. So the official destroys the person who brought the problem up. The water pipe never gets fixed.

Izzat is also the reason why Indian managers are so infamous for hiring more Indians. It’s because from the manager’s perspective, he’s using his position to gain an invisible social currency. Merit and actual qualifications come second to that idea. If he hired a westerner, he would not gain or even lose Izzat by doing so. He has a very strong cultural incentive not to be impartial. Meanwhile, if he can strong-arm dozens of Indians into a company, he is gaining huge quantities of Izzat and conspirators who owe an absolute debt to him.

It’s not uncommon to see Indians gloat about their success in the west. And yes, izzat is very much a system that enables short term success. But the fundamental reality is the prosperity that these Indians find so attractive in the first place wouldn’t exist if the west practiced something similar to Izzat. Our systems can only exist on the assumption of good faith, and not a majority of people exploiting them for destructive short term gain. On top of that, if an Indian causes the systems and companies he comes into contact with to collapse, then he can just go back to India with his plunder. He has no stakes in the long-term prosperity, functionality or stability of these systems. The stakes are completely asymmetrical in the Indian’s favour.

You all know about that infamous video of that Indian scamming a food bank. Once again, winning is righteous. Losing is not. By employing ‘clever’ means (jugaad), he successfully extracted more resources for himself and his family. From the perspective of jugaad, a rule is not something to respect, but merely an obstacle to the Indian’s own gain. Since he cheated the system and wasn’t caught, he is seen as a righteous and dignified man in the Izzat framework.

• We can attest to this being an issue: One of the businesses we ran had clients from all over the world: The USA, Spain, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and India

• While we had occasional issues with Venezuelan clients getting in trouble by helping people flee the country (pretty reasonable) for the most part our agency clients were reasonable

• However, our Indian clients were so systematically scammy that we had to completely change our terms

• They violated major vendor contracts so egregiously we almost lost key vendors that were crucial for our business operations

• One racked up $60,000 in expenses in a way that was obscured from us and then disappeared, leaving us with the bill

• We also started hearing from these clients’ direct customers, who were being scammed by them

I read a story in India about a man offering to pay another man to use a public toilet instead of defecating openly. The latter left and came back with several friends and beat the former to death. The problem was not that he was defecating openly, but that he was criticised for doing so. And with Izzat, it’s not an eye-for-an-eye. Izzat is often an eye-for-a-whole-head. Disproportionately and brutally annihilating your enemies is the correct move to make because you take back your lost Izzat and then some. This kind of vindictiveness would be rightly seen as horrifying and disgusting in most of the world.

There was a greentext from 4chan (I don’t have it so bear with me). Anon knew an Indian. This Indian would make outlandish claims (he could benchpress 500kg, he was a billionaire, he did arms deals with the US government). Anon said he didn’t believe the Indian. The Indian reacted with righteous indignation. The situation escalated to the point where the Indian was emailing Anon death threats. Anon responded by forwarding the emails to the police. The Indian killed himself. Anon was left baffled at the whole situation and had no idea what the fuck just happened.

So, without Izzat, this looks like an utterly insane and pointless sequence of events. But with Izzat? The Indian’s actions suddenly make sense. He was boasting to increase his Izzat, and when Anon simply stated his disbelief, it was seen as a vicious attack on his Izzat. The Indian escalated the situation to restore the lost Izzat. When the police got involved, the dispute had become public, so the Indian’s shame had increased to unbearable levels. He committed suicide in order to save his remaining Izzat. Anon had no idea what Izzat was, or if he did, he didn’t mention it, yet the Indian’s actions perfectly align with this framework. This is what makes me believe the green text was genuine.

The western idea of merit is competence in a role. Merit in Izzat is determined by what lengths you will go to to achieve a goal, with competence merely being one path. It often becomes a secondary path, as printing a degree that says you’re qualified to be a jet pilot is just as good as being able to actually fly a jet in the eyes of Izzat. In other words, Izzat selects for appearance over authentic merit or morality.

• NOTE: He’s probably using the jet pilot example in reference to a very real issue with Air India: Regulators have repeatedly cited Air India for inadequate or falsified pilot training — from unapproved simulators and skipped monitoring requirements to outright fraudulent training logs — with the most serious recent scrutiny coming after the 2025 Ahmedabad crash.

Now, a counterargument an Indian might make is ‘Izzat is a dated word’ or ‘We don’t use that word.’ I like to compare it to the word vendetta. Vendetta in Italian has a very specific meaning (a familial blood feud where revenge must be taken to restore honour etc). This word would not exist if this didn’t reflect a specific facet of Italian life. Izzat is no different. Hell, I’ve had to write several paragraphs just to explain what the hell Izzat is. It isn’t an archaic term either. It’s well and truly alive in the modern Indian lexicon.

If izzat were regularly discussed openly, this would be considered one of the greatest possible insults in the Izzat framework. Izzat is why Indians do mass reports, death threats, false flags and various other underhanded tactics when a westerner exposes something they don’t want people to see (such as the poop throwing festival). If I knew something like that existed in the west, I would say ‘wow that’s disgusting, we should stop this’. But in India, the problem is not the point. The point is the problem being exposed and the perceived insult to izzat from exposing the problem. The water pipe never gets fixed.

The one saving grace is Izzat performs awfully in the long term. Once Indians displace you, they will go back to playing this insane game among themselves. It’s what happened to companies that got hit by Izzat. This is also why there aren’t any homegrown Indian companies that have the same influence as Microsoft or Google. Whenever they start getting ahead, their companies implode from infighting, nobody doing their jobs, everybody trying to cheat each other and nobody addressing critical issues. Systems that delegate authority and work on good faith eventually win out over zero-sum honour feuding. Izzat cannot maintain complex systems because its players are only concerned with short term gain.

With the west, the issue is that it often fails to live up to its own ideals. It’s not a perfect system, but we can course correct and address problems pragmatically. With Izzat, Indians live up to those ideals very, very often. When you see the dysfunctionality of India, remember that it’s a feature of Izzat, not a bug.

Jugaad as a term also warrants more explanation, but my post is long enough as it is.

Fact Checks

Accurate

• Izzat is a real South Asian concept of honor, family reputation, and social standing

  • especially of the family, clan, caste, or community rather than just the individual.

• It is used across religions in North India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

• A 2017 Delhi toilet/urinating case that OP cites (I did not bother to read it) is real.

  • Ravinder Kumar, an e-rickshaw driver, offered two young men a few rupees to use a nearby public toilet instead of urinating on the roadside. They left, returned with a group, and beat him to death. The post slightly misstates it as open defecation, but the incident happened and illustrates extreme, disproportionate reaction to public shaming. It is not evidence that “two Indians in an argument” always risk decades-long deadly feuds.

• Many Indians did freak out after Tyler Oliviera went to the Indian poop festival

• Food-bank videos of Indian international students exist and were controversial.

  • Clips from Canada, Ireland, and elsewhere showed students (sometimes explaining how to access university or community food programs) using resources.

  • Some cases were framed as scams; others were official student supports. Debates followed about need vs. opportunism.

  • Jugaad (improvisation/workaround, sometimes cutting corners) is a real term with both positive (“frugal innovation”) and negative (“half-baked shortcut, rule-bending”) connotations in India.

• Networking and favoritism in some Indian tech/H-1B circles is widely reported.

  • Indian nationals dominate H-1B visas.

  • There are documented patterns of regional/caste/language clustering, allegations of Indian managers preferring co-ethnics, visa-holder exploitation, and at least one major lawsuit (Cognizant) finding discrimination against non-Indians. Immigrant ethnic networks are common across groups; attributing it primarily to “gaining Izzat” is speculative.

Beyond Just What OP Says:

• Izaat is to thank for honor killings in these regions (see: “For the Sake of Family and Tradition: Honour Killings in India and Pakistan”, which explicitly identifies izzat s a central framework that helps explain and justify honour killings in India and Pakistan.)

  • From their abstract:

    • “The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that the annual worldwide number of honour killings is as high as 5,000 women and girls, though some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) estimate as many as 20,000 honour killings annually worldwide.”

    • “Despite limited statistics, research shows that honour killings occur amongst women of different ages, religions, and social status, wealth, education, and location.”

  • Other experiments found that high-caste rural North Indian men showed more retaliatory attitudes to slights than low-caste men. Admitting error can carry social cost in status-conscious settings. Police and officials sometimes handle “community matters” poorly due to panchayats, influence, or fear of escalation

Unverifiable

• The anecdotes he presents (however our anecdotes are verifiable)

Inaccurate

• India is not a cultural monolith; Izzat is not universally practiced (Most Indians do not treat every disagreement as an existential honor feud.)

• (At least per peer-reviewed academic researchers), Izzat is not “undiscussable” in the way the post claims (e.g. OP states that Izzat openly is “one of the greatest possible insults.”—the term appears routinely in news, literature, activism, and everyday speech.

• “Any action including murder is justified” and “eye-for-a-whole-head” as the default for trivial slights. Honor violence is real but concentrated on specific triggers (women’s conduct, caste, marriage). Most interpersonal disputes in India do not become blood feuds. Treating this as the operating system for all Indians is false.

• “Police cannot be impartial because siding with anyone “marks them for retribution.” Authorities do intervene, prosecute, and sometimes fail—for the same mix of corruption, overload, community pressure, and incompetence seen in many countries. The claim that centralized authority is inherently impossible is not supported.”

Posts Critiquing Western Culture

• An African diaspora poster: Djehuty Ma’at-Ra @DjehutySpeaks: 😂😂😂 These people are impacted by the West and Western ways. The American environment is imbalanced and toxic, anti-communal/community. They (certain Blacks) are looking through Western lens and not African lens. Western = individualism; African/Eastern = communalism/family oriented. “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

• An Indonesian-Chinese poster林 Linnamon @_linnamon_: Ironically instead of empowering a person, individualism is more likely to destroys a person’s purpose in life. You don’t have any goal except worldly hedonism. Don’t ask again why so many folks are easily depressed and become antisocial when this is the value of your society 👇

  • He’s pointing to someone’s post reading “society is based on self interest”

• A video posted by @viprabuddhi of a Canadian Chinese man (often labeled “Chinese Historian” in the replies) walking through how Western hookup and drinking culture wrecks family formation and women’s long-term outcomes. He links casual sex, campus/date rape, alcohol-fueled decisions, one-night stands, unwanted pregnancies, and later divorce to women looking “terrible” by their 30s and families that cannot stay together. He argues Westernized Asian women who absorb the same pattern are described as following the same collapse.

• Indian accounts repeatedly frame Western culture as the vector that broke family discipline:

  • @IshBhatt197: “It’s all because of following blindly to western culture ....families are broken..no morals...no values....FREEDOM...FAKE FEMINISM....”

  • Dr. Van Nostrand @RSD270: “This entire thing, such shows, the kind of humour, this dating & hooking up culture, is all adopted under peer pressure from the west, this doesn’t come naturally to our society, and it shows. Only those unswayed by this will survive in the long run, rest will drown in degeneracy”

  • shailputri (quater life crises) @shailputri_gd quote tweeting:

    • Radha 🌟 @SheIsTheFire, who posted: “Dear women, Never ever, I repeat, NEVER EVER, discuss your past with your husband or your would-be-husband. Some things need to go with you to your grave! Or else there is a big chance your partner will make sure he digs a living grave for you with whatever you shared with him out of pure honesty and trust. Not everyone has the maturity to understand relationships and the life choices of a woman! #TwishaSharma #TwishaSharmaDeathCase”

      • Bit of a spoiler about the western criticism of Izzat we’re about to get into

    • With: “western feminism taught indian women about sexual liberation but failed to impart them with the faustian spirit of anglo feminism white women hoed openly and didnt give a fuck about what society thought of em meanwhile women here wanna hoe and still be perceived as sati savitri”

Episode Transcript

Simone Collins [0:00]:
. Hello, Malcolm. I’m excited, I think, to be chatting with you today even though we’re speedrunning our doom on YouTube because it’s Homath, who’s now going by Homath equals psychomath on X now, recently quote tweeted this 2025 post on the Indian concept of Izzat writing, please read every word, then go back and read it again. The Indian problem is set to grow exponentially. And initially, skipping the write up shared, which portrays Izzat, this concept, as a a zero sum system of collective honor that drives conflict and corruption and favoritism and institutional dysfunction among Indians. I just went straight to the comments, and maybe it was like, oh, man. This is racist. I can’t take this seriously. But then it was like, wait. Other groups criticize elements of Western culture all the time. And when people do this, Westerners don’t freak out or yell racist. In fact, we often agree and then engage in discourse about it.

Malcolm Collins [1:00]:
And Well, hold on. It’s not just Western culture. Like, uh, people constantly talk about how saving face creates major systemic problems within Chinese culture.

Simone Collins [1:11]:
Yeah. 100%. Yeah. This isn’t just an anti Indian thing. Um, but I I actually think that racism becomes worse. And we’ve talked about this just recently when people slap legitimate critiques of bad behavior with the label of racism. So what we’re gonna do, okay, is we’re gonna read the write up on Izan. It’s kinda long, so I’m gonna take some choice quotes. Then we’re gonna fact check it. Okay, YouTube. We’re gonna fact check it, and then we’re gonna review posts critiquing facets of Western culture that are problematic so that we can see, look, this is not this is not a one-sided thing. This is a collective discourse that we all should be having even if we all sound a little angry at people when we do it. And then we’re gonna discuss all of these cultural shortcomings with the same approach we discussed the failings of Western culture, all from the perspective of cultural technologies and or traits that either contribute to or hamper human flourishing. Okay? So let’s get into the Ezat post. Hold on. Hold on.

Malcolm Collins [2:06]:
Hold on. That’s a that is a lot of hand waving Simone just did to try to say, I’m gonna be super racist against Indians.

Simone Collins [2:13]:
I don’t wanna be demonic. Stop.

Malcolm Collins [2:16]:
Simone Simone, I I will add the caveat. I have actually, in real life, never met an Indian person I didn’t like. The

Simone Collins [2:25]:
What about the Indians who stole tens of thousands of dollars from them? Met them.

Malcolm Collins [2:33]:
They they I never talked to them. That was you who was communicating with them. But I will say that there are problems. Like, there are systemic issues that we need to address, um, and talking about these issues is important to seriously addressing them. Continue. Simone. You you you are so

Simone Collins [2:52]:
It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. Okay. On November 20 on 11/02/2025, at x Josh posted three recent Kiwi Farm screenshots to x saying, Kiwi Farm’s user breaks down Izat, the Indian subcontinent’s cultural honor system. It effectively explains every single trope about Indian behavior. They all participate in an invisible clout chasing game that involves screwing over everyone as much as possible. Worth the read. And the screenshots show this post by Gluttonous Manslob, Fair Kiwi Farms. I’m just gonna read some excerpts from it. Alright? So we’ll just jump right in. The gluttonous manslob typed, we only have terms that can broach the same concept such as honor or reputation or face. Izzat is so much more than that. It’s a zero sum game of collective honor shared by the whole groups of people, all of whom take it very, very seriously. A system like this isn’t just foreign to enlightenment values, but I’d argue it’s antithetical to every sensible form of governance on the planet. It will destroy any system that assumes good faith. Izzat conflicts sorry. Izzat conflicts are not about who is right and who is wrong. It’s about who wins and who loses. This means it’s a zero sum game where just about any action is justified, including murder, to restore the lost Izzat. Izzat is a limited social currency, and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else. Winning is righteous in Izzat. Losing is unrighteous. This means that if someone plays the game of Yzat well enough, they can get away with just about anything, murder, rape, scamming, cheating, stealing. The only morality in Yzat is the protection of your group’s collective ego. The only appropriate response when your Yzat is attacked is a complete destruction of whoever insulted it. Two people get into an argument. They might escalate, but chances are it won’t be that bad. I e, sorry. I broke your garden gnome with two Indians in an argument. The stakes are always deadly to Ezat. Neither of them can back down nor then can they admit fault. Admitting fault is seen as deliberately humiliating yourself. Not only that, but because Ezat is shared, you’re shimming everyone who shares your Ezat. So admitting fault or taking responsibility for a problem is a form of social suicide. This means if the dispute was over something completely fucking stupid or trivial, like a broken garden gnome, it could spiral into decades long honor feud.

Malcolm Collins [5:25]:
So I I’ve gotta I’ve gotta already have a caveat here

Simone Collins [5:28]:
Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [5:28]:
Because the moment you started reading this, I was like, this is completely incompatible with a number of Indian cultures Yeah. As a concept.

Simone Collins [5:38]:
Yes.

Malcolm Collins [5:38]:
And I was like for you, I was like, this is, like, the opposite of Jainism. Like, if you ever met, like, a Jain, you would know that whatever is being described here is the exact opposite of Jainism in in every Jain value. So I was like, okay. Where is this actually in India? So Izzat is not actually practiced over all of India. It is an Arabic derived word

Simone Collins [6:05]:
It is. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [6:06]:
Particularly in North India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Yeah.

Simone Collins [6:10]:
But also, Malcolm, keep in mind, right, percentage of rural population. Indians are 18.3 of the world population. Pakistanis are 3.2% of the world population. Chains are point 07% of the population. So to be like, but chains, the the yes. One of the biggest things with the the sweeping claims that what gluttonous fact, gluttonous slob says, it’s wrong to say this is universal. Also, the this concept is such that even if a small

Malcolm Collins [6:43]:
No. No. No. No. No. No. Hold on. It’s not wrong to say that it’s universal. Certain things you can say about a cultural group or whatever, but being aware that you’re talking about a concept that is mostly tied to one group among a group that already hates each other. Right?

Simone Collins [7:06]:
Like Yes. For real.

Malcolm Collins [7:07]:
And Hindi Indians are, like, practically about to have a an ethnically civil war.

Simone Collins [7:14]:
Recently almost get there. When we were traveling with the kids, there was something about that. Like, a war was almost diverted or whatever. Remember? They’re always at the verge. Don’t they do that play war every day at the border? You know what I’m talking about?

Malcolm Collins [7:30]:
Yeah. So the the the point yes. But the point here being, right, is you are severely kneecapping yourself if among your enemy troop like, you’re like, these people are our enemy. Uh-huh. And only 40% of those people are your enemy and the other 60% actually wanna murder that 40%.

Simone Collins [7:50]:
Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [7:50]:
You have completely what are you doing?

Simone Collins [7:54]:
Totally.

Malcolm Collins [7:54]:
What are you doing? You are throwing away your ability to actually win any sort of larger game by being myopically racist a in a bad way. Like, I I I believe in educated racism. If you want to learn about another culture and how they’re unique, but don’t confuse like, the Christian Indians don’t practice this system either. It’s not practiced in their regions.

Speaker 7 [8:18]:
It’s also not recorded in Buddhist communities.

Malcolm Collins [8:22]:
Stoking internal ethnic tensions is one of your greatest strengths when you are we did this with the Native Americans like crazy. Why are you What? No. Sorry. But I I the point being is that’s how you actually win. That’s how like, if you’re actually playing any sort of game of, like, I care about my ethnic group’s best interest, you undermine those best interests by saying all Indians are bad. Okay? Yeah. You grow those interests by being like some Indian groups we get along with. Some Indian groups are do have cultures that are antithetical to ours, and you go to the Indian groups that are you get along with, and you go, hey. Indians who we get along with, we do trade. We like each other a lot. And you know what? I haven’t liked that group over there for a really long time. And they’re like, you know what? We haven’t liked them either. And then we say, okay. It’s so weird. I happen to bring a bunch of guns along. So I’m just gonna leave them here, and we’ll come back in a week and see how things went. And you Simone’s looking into the distance, but that is basically what The United States has been doing with Israel for the past fifty years. People are like, why do we keep giving them military technology? I wonder. Anyway, continue.

Speaker 8 [9:49]:
And it’s also important to remember that the relative difference you have with a group based on one in particular cultural difference, like, say, Just because you’re like, I disagree with this cultural practice, and it leads to friction with my group does not mean that the two groups are totally incompatible. It just means you may need to treat them differently. As we’ll talk about later in this we have a travel business. And every single time and and note, we’ve worked with thousands of clients from all over the world, and we have dealt with very few scams. But literally every single time we have worked with an Indian client, we have had them attempt to scam people. And that led us to implement different policies around how we onboard our Indian clients. And that is just the way you deal with something like this. for even if I have a problem with, I might have more of a problem with cultural groups that have norms around marrying children. and I might think, no. That’s really bad. Or I might have more problems with cultural groups that have a mandate to eradicate my people, which Indians don’t have. and some groups genuinely do that we also allow in as immigrants. It’s important to remember all these things relative to each other and not take these absolutist positions of I hate this group or I hate this group or I hate this group because the people who take those positions, they end up doing more to isolate our communities. Like, you can recognize differences in groups. You can recognize problems within groups while still saying, like I get it at the beginning of this, every individual Indian I have ever met, I have liked.

Simone Collins [11:29]:
I shall continue reading from the, yes, admittedly very sweeping write up, which I don’t endorse. I’m just reading this is part of the beginning of the discourse. Anyway, he writes, is also the reason why police are reluctant to get involved in disputes because Ezat is a zero sum game. All participants are involved in the game. If a policeman sides with one family over another in an Ezat dispute, this means he’s deliberately taking the side of that family and dishonoring the other. This marks him for retribution by the offending party. Without the parties being able to be impartial, then centralized authority cannot effectively function. Let’s say someone in India complains about a broken water pipe. Instead of the problem being addressed, the official is responsible for the water pipe, denies it’s a problem, and counterattacks him instead because daring to question his efficacy and his role was challenging his. So the official destroys the person who brought the problem up. The water pipe never gets fixed. Izzat is the reason why Indian managers are so infamous for hiring more Indians. It’s because from the manager’s perspective, he’s hiring his position sorry. He’s using his position to gain an invisible social currency. Merit and actual qualifications come second to that idea. If he hired a westerner, he would not gain or even lose Izzat by doing so. He has a very strong cultural incentive to not be impartial. Meanwhile, if he can strong-arm dozens of Indians into a company, he is gaining huge quantities of Vizat and his conspirators who owe an absolute debt to him. It’s not

Malcolm Collins [13:00]:
uncommon Sorry, Simone. I have to I have to cut in here. I I I misspoke. I I did more research. It is actually also common among the Hindi group. So they so it’s common among both the Hindi and the Muslim Indians, and it’s not common among the Jain and the Christian Indians.

Simone Collins [13:13]:
Well, that makes sense. Um, because when people say Western, they they they typically mean Christian. And Jane is just like, let’s never hurry.

Malcolm Collins [13:21]:
Whatever. The Christian Indians have been there since the first wave of conversions. There have been Christian communities in India as long as there’s been Christian communities in Italy.

Simone Collins [13:31]:
That why does that surprise you?

Malcolm Collins [13:32]:
No. But the point I’m making is that’s not Western. Christianity is is an old religion in India. It’s not like a they’re

Simone Collins [13:38]:
not like a Western. What I mean to say is when people are talking about Western civilization, they’re typically talking about Christian civilization.

Malcolm Collins [13:44]:
Okay. Okay. Continue.

Simone Collins [13:45]:
It’s not uncommon to see Indians gloat about their success in the West. And, yes, Izzat is very much a system that enables short term success, but the fundamental reality is that prosperity oh, the fundamental reality of that prosperity that these Indians find so attractive in the first place wouldn’t exist if the West practice something similar to Isat. Our systems can exist only on the assumption of good faith and not a majority of people exploiting them for destructive short term gain. On top of that, if an Indian causes the symptoms and systems and companies he comes into contact with to collapse, then he could just go back to India with his plunder. He has no stakes in the long term prosperity, functionality, or stability of these systems. These stakes are completely asymmetrical in the Indian’s favor. You all know about the infamous video of that Indian scamming a food bank. Once again, winning is righteous, losing is not. By employing a clever means to God this is another concept he

Malcolm Collins [14:39]:
could have gone into, but he

Simone Collins [14:40]:
chose not to because it would be a whole new can of worms. He successfully extracted more resources for himself and his family. From the perspective of Jugadh, a rule is not something to respect, but merely an obstacle to the Indian’s own gain. Mhmm. Since he cheated the system and wasn’t caught, he’s seen as righteous and dignified man with the EZOP framework. Now I can go ahead and fact check this right away because I would normally have not believed this, but we can attest to this being an issue. Yeah. Because one of the businesses we ran had clients from all over the world. It had clients in The USA, in Spain, in Italy, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, and, yes, also India. And while we had occasional issues with Venezuelan clients, typically, who are getting in trouble by literally just trying to help Venezuelans flee Venezuela. Like, it was a constant issue. But they were also, like, I kinda get it. I think you can too. The the the the Indian clients we had became such an issue that we had to completely change our client onboarding policies in a way where before we were able to trust our clients basically with a whole bunch of things that we just had to completely shut down after we were discovered by Indian clients. So among other things, they’ve violated major vendor contracts of ours that we depended on for the business to function such that we almost lost them entirely. Like, those vendors were like, look. Look at all these these horrible rules you’ve broken at scale to make a bunch of money. We’re gonna pull your plates at this it’s it’s a sorry. This is, a very convoluted airline term. But, like, we were we were running a travel agency, and these airlines were like, you will not be able to book tickets with us anymore because of all this cheating. And it was because of an Indian sub agency doing all this in our name. Um, one, racked up over $60,000 in expenses in a way that was obscured from us being very clever, Chugot, and then disappeared, leaving us with the bill. And we also started hearing from the direct customers of these clients of ours, these, like, sub agencies that transacted in our name, who were being totally scammed by them. And we’re like, oh, we can’t we can’t do this anymore. And they

Malcolm Collins [16:48]:
were prolific

Simone Collins [16:49]:
in what they did. Yeah. The reason we started working with them in the first place was because when they first came on, they were like, oh, we’re so professional. Let’s be let’s work together. This is gonna be great. And they were really good with technology, we’re like, wow. What a great partner. This is gonna be fantastic because most of the agencies that we worked with were very low tech. The volume comes in. It’s high. Everything seems great. And then all of a sudden, you know, airlines, like, we’re we’re pulling your plates. Customers are like, I’m you know, you you stole $10,000 from me. And then, like, you know, oh, by the way, here’s a bill for $60,000. And then the client is like, this was horrible. Zero remorse. Zero remorse. In fact, we had some instances where we tried to reconcile with some of these clients because, like, they gave us a lot of excuses, And we gave two of them second chances. You wanna know what they did right after that? Immediately did it again. Immediately. Yes. And that I mean, I I genuinely didn’t get it because I was like, no one could possibly be doing this on purpose. That’s crazy. And then I read this, and I’m like, maybe that was it. You know?

Malcolm Collins [17:51]:
Well, I think that this okay. So I get I guess it’s the Hindis and the Muslims we keep out, and we bring in the Jains and the Christians. Okay.

Simone Collins [17:57]:
This is

Malcolm Collins [17:58]:
the way this is the way we handle it. Right?

Simone Collins [17:59]:
Well, there aren’t very many.

Malcolm Collins [18:02]:
There there there’s a lot of them. You forget how big India is. It might be a small percentage of the overall population. Okay. I’ll

Simone Collins [18:16]:
Yeah. We’re looking it up. Okay? Christians make up 2.3% of the total population in India according to the official 2011 census of India.

Malcolm Collins [18:26]:
Give it

Simone Collins [18:27]:
a I I would million people.

Malcolm Collins [18:29]:
Okay. So a Christian 28,000,000 people, you said? Mhmm. Okay. So how many Christians are in Germany?

Simone Collins [18:37]:
Okay. Fair. Fair. Good point. Good point. Let’s see. How many Christians are in Italy? Probably better.

Malcolm Collins [18:44]:
Yeah. I’ll I’ll do the Christians are in Germany.

Simone Collins [18:52]:
38,000,000 people.

Malcolm Collins [18:53]:
34,000,000 in Germany. There are 27,800,000. So, like, 28,000,000 in India. So, like, not much smaller than Germany.

Simone Collins [19:02]:
Okay. Oh, fair. Fair then. Fair. Yeah. India is big. It’s big. It’s big, and it’s very diverse and very varied. And the okay. We’re cool with the Jains and the Christians. Anyway, I I did blog. I I took out a bunch of the I I’m skipping forward. He continues. The Western idea of merit is a is competence in a role. Merit in is determined by what lengths you will go to to achieve a goal with competence merely being one path. It often becomes a secondary path as printing a degree that says you’re qualified to be a jet pilot is just as good as being able to actually fly a jet in the eyes of Yzat. In other words, Yzat selects for appearance over authentic merit or morality. Now this is funny because at first, I tried to use just to save on, like, tokens because we already pay for the subscription, I tried to fact check this using Grok. And Grok’s like, well, it’s not it’s not fair to say that Indians are just making up their pilot credentials. But, again, you and I know how to reach travel industry about Air India. And I think that the writer of this, like, explicitly used that example of a jet pilot qualification, um, in reference to Air India. Regulators have repeatedly cited Air India for inadequate or falsified pilot training from unapproved simulators and skipped monitoring requirements to outright fraudulent training logs with the most serious recent scrutiny coming after the twenty twenty five Ahmedabad crash. And that is not the the only crash recently, but the Air India is, like, famous. Like, everyone in the in the industry jokes in being, like reckless airline. India. Yeah. For real. Yeah. As long as he doesn’t get on an Air India flight, it’s like, oh, The that airline that doesn’t have real pilots. It’s like a known open joke. So I found it, like, really alarming that Grock was like, well, it’s

Malcolm Collins [20:54]:
not very good. Like, no. So she had to go to rfab.ai, rfab.ai. It’s a site we run, and then go into productivity tools and then go into based AI and use the Rhodes model,

Simone Collins [21:06]:
which

Malcolm Collins [21:06]:
we use for I had to use it for an episode recently because Grock just cannot handle some things. Um, and if you want an honest AI, Rhodes is the only one in there

Simone Collins [21:17]:
out there.

Malcolm Collins [21:18]:
Like like, genuine. It’s the it’s the it’s the but it it is actually good at dealing with these types of topics. Yeah.

Simone Collins [21:24]:
Yeah. And, I mean, the only reason I would have known that, like, Grok was being so skewed was because I actually knew about the Air India stuff myself. I was like, oh, that’s not true. Anyway, he continues. Now a counterargument an Indian might make is, isad is a dated word or we don’t use that word. I like to compare it to the word vendetta. Vendetta in Italian has a very specific meaning, a familial blood feud where revenge must be taken to restore honor, etcetera. This word would not exist if it didn’t reflect a specific facet of Italian life. Izzat is no different. Hell, I’ve had to write several paragraphs just to explain what the hell Izzat is. It isn’t an archaic term either. It’s well and truly alive in the modern Indian lexicon. If is that were regularly discussed openly, this would be considered one of the greatest possible insults in the is that framework. ISAT is why Indians do mass reports, death threats, false flags, and other and various other underhanded tactics when a westerner exposes something they don’t want people to see, such as the poop throwing festival, which Tyler Olavira did, if you remember. Yeah. If I knew something like that existed.

Malcolm Collins [22:29]:
It’s it’s a part of your cultural history. What do what do you the the response to it made it look worse than the event itself.

Simone Collins [22:36]:
Yeah. This person says to my earlier point, if I knew something like that existed in the West, I would say, wow. That’s disgusting. We should stop this. But in India, the problem is not the point. The point is the problem being exposed and the perceived insult to a zod from exposing the problem. The water pipe never gets fixed. This is the last paragraph I’m almost done. With the West, the issue is that it often fails to live up to its own ideals. It is not a perfect system, but we can course correct and address problems pragmatically. With the Azat, Indians live up to those ideals very, very often. When you see the dysfunctionality of India, remember that it’s a feature of Azat, not a bug. Any thoughts before you back

Malcolm Collins [23:12]:
back check? What I find very interesting about this is I think one of, uh, and and there’s a secondary explanation to this that we might do a full episode on. One of the big questions, you know, when you see these giant trash mounds and all these starving people in India and stuff like that, the question that you ask is why? India isn’t okay. I I won’t make a direct comparison here. Let’s say, um, when I look at Indians in The United States and how they often perform, um, uh, when compared to other ethnic groups that post colonization have become considerably wealthy, such as Koreans or Japanese or Chinese, they are not particularly dissimilar.

Simone Collins [24:00]:
They often perform exceptionally. We we live in a a very densely Indian immigrant community, which is awesome. The kids are awesome. The families are awesome. It’s it’s a wonderful community.

Malcolm Collins [24:11]:
What she said because you were talking over me, it didn’t come out.

Simone Collins [24:13]:
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

Malcolm Collins [24:14]:
She said we live we, Malcolm and Simone, live in a majority Indian community. Our community is 70% Indian. And it’s like, I feel much better living in this community than in most communities because at least they’re anti woke. At least they’re they’re anti the the BS the schools are doing. You know? At least their kids

Simone Collins [24:34]:
They’re really nice. We kids too. We mostly know them because of their kids because that you know, our kids play together and stuff. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [24:42]:
With all of that being the case and and and I say at least because there’s other immigrant communities where I would absolutely be terrified about that. So the the point that I’m making here is why is it that Indians are successful in other countries, but their own country has failed to build a civilization at the level of something like what Korea or Japan has done? And the answer this would answer a lot of that. If this is commonly practiced by the dominant ethnic religious cultural group, the Hindis, which it appears to be, then it’s a big problem for the country continuing to develop. It’s it’s something that is going to lead to issues. That is that is really sad, and I and I think you could see that. Like, it it is genuinely perplexing how India is still so poor. However, there is a secondary answer as to why India is so poor, which you may also not be familiar with.

Simone Collins [25:40]:
Is it oh, I mean, I I assume that the average person listening to this is gonna be like, well, that’s because Brahmins are immigrating, and you’re only seeing one small facet of India’s whole range.

Malcolm Collins [25:49]:
Also true. Brahmins are quite genetically distinct from other groups in India. They are as

Simone Collins [25:54]:
Right. And if you wanna take a leftist framing to it, these people have inherited wealth and systemic advantage in the country.

Malcolm Collins [25:59]:
Yeah. If you it would we don’t take that. If you a a Brahmin is genetically distinct from a non Brahmin as a German is from a Greek. And, like, nobody expects a Greek to work.

Speaker 4 [26:11]:
Afreganathans are good people. Good people? They’re Greeks, and Greeks are just Jews without money.

Simone Collins [26:18]:
So, like We’re really going for it today, aren’t we, Malcolm? I’ve gotta

Malcolm Collins [26:22]:
I’ve gotta do the the Greek

Simone Collins [26:24]:
Patreon and Substack, ladies and gentlemen. Please help. Please help. Please send help.

Malcolm Collins [26:30]:
But, yeah, the the point I’m making here. Okay? The point is is, yes, the Brahmins are part of it. Right? Like, we definitely get the cream of the crop of India, or at least at a point in American history, we got the cream of the crop of India. And those are the friends that I grew up around and you grew up around. That’s not necessarily true of the existing immigration wave right now where you have a much larger immigrant groups coming over. Um, but the secondary issue is that when India began to build its own society after they the British left and typically, British colonies do really well, like America, Canada, South Africa, Australia. And the more they move away from a British system like South Africa attempted to, the worse they do. But so India was really set up to do quite well. And the the reason, Hong Kong, another one that did really well, is when the British left, they decided, like, psycho idiots, that British colonism meant that colonism was tied to capitalism. And so what they wanted to do was be something other than capitalist. But they also didn’t wanna be fully communist. And so they developed a a socialist system that was incredibly damaging to their economic development, where you would have to get, like, 48 forms to, like, just start a business or, like, change something about how your business operates or just move goods and stuff like this. It was just, like, paperwork upon paperwork for everything. And they only dropped it in, like, the late eighties. So they’re basically starting from, like, square one pretty recently.

Simone Collins [28:26]:
Fair enough. Yeah. Wanna get to the fact checking?

Malcolm Collins [28:31]:
Yeah.

Simone Collins [28:32]:
Alright. Because I I really I had to I I wanted to make sure everything here. And I

Malcolm Collins [28:36]:
wanna know what this other word is that he talked about.

Simone Collins [28:38]:
Oh, it’s basically just cleverness and resourcefulness. But in a way, they can lead to a lot of scamming because it seems to be not more to morality. But, I mean, I think there are similar concepts that you’ll see, like, in the Jack Tales. I mean Yeah. Is kind of a not very nice sometimes. You know? Like, he gets some money to buy something, and he gets magic beans. And then

Malcolm Collins [29:01]:
he kills the giant Morality. Yeah. Is in Jacktail’s morality, um, the person who you wrong typically needs to be invading on your land or property or your region or think they’re better than you.

Simone Collins [29:14]:
Excuse me. The giant in the clouds was doing the only thing. They think they’re better than you is a big one. Better. I mean, he wanted to eat him.

Malcolm Collins [29:24]:
Right. But the the the and it’s not done for status in the community. It’s not done you you know, you might get money for your family. Right? But it certainly wouldn’t be something that other people in the community would lodge you for. Like, Jack is never lauded as intelligent by other people in the community. He he gains no form of status for his feats. He does it just with people. But much closer to 4chan than Izat. Fair enough. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s effing with people for the for the sake for the zen Not the lulls. Of effing with people. Yes. Oh my

Simone Collins [30:02]:
god. Yeah. To use a millennial term because we’re old. I just love that. I love being old. Can’t wait till I’m 62. Anyway, true. Baby. True. Yeah. Me too. But you’re gonna need to help me out tonight. I’m having some pretty severe cramping, and I’m bleeding a little, and I’m really worried. So help me out. I need to go to bed early and just, like, maybe rest in bed.

Speaker 5 [30:24]:
So, sadly, she did end up having a miscarriage, and we, yesterday, went out and buried the baby. And we’ll obviously keep trying. This will be number six for us, so we’ve been very blessed. And that’s something that we should continue to be appreciative of, but we ended up taking most of the day off today for the first time in, god, at least five years. Maybe maybe since I married her taking a day off. But, yeah, obviously, still making sure you guys get an episode every day. I’m not gonna break that that chain since we launched the channel. Like and subscribe if you appreciate that we try to make sure that happens. As to whether or not we’ll do an episode on it, we might.

Speaker 9 [31:12]:
The reason we may wanna do an episode on it is because, emotionally, this affected both of us much more than the death of our moms, which happened at different times in our marriage, and that surprised us.

Simone Collins [31:23]:
Is that is a real South Asian concept of honor and family reputation and social standing. It is real. There there’s peer reviewed research on it. I’ve linked to it in the show notes, which are on sub second Patreon. It’s especially, uh, the social standing matters in the context of the family, the clan, the cast, or the community rather than just the individual. It’s used across regions in Northern India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. A 2017 Delhi toilet urination case that OP sites in his write up, which I didn’t bother to read, is real. It involved this man named Ravinder Kumar, who was an e rickshaw driver, who saw two men, two young men urinating outside, and he offered them a few rupees to use in nearby public toilet instead of peeing in public. And they left and then returned with a group and then beat him to death. And that is is a is an example that he cited of of That’s severe. Like, how could your country operate like that? That is a question. Yes. That is that is a real question. And when I heard that story, I was like, well, that’s probably gonna be one of those unsubstantiated anecdotal things. No. Definitely not. Of course, we all know about the backlash that happened when Tyler Oliveira went to the Indian poop festival. And what I find so funny about that too was he was very explicit in the video, which I’ve seen, that this is a small isolated village. It’s a very small population. It is an esoteric and weird festival. He wasn’t like, oh, this is a a holiday that all Indians celebrate. He never said that, which is why it’s so weird and unhinged that a lot of Indians had that reaction to it that they did. Um, also, the food bank videos of Indian international students do exist, like, of them being like, look. You can just take food from this, and it’s free. We’re quite controversial when they posted them. Clips from Canada, Ireland, and elsewhere showed students sometimes explaining how to access university or community food programs using resources. Some of the cases were framed as scams. Others were official student supports. Debates followed about need versus opportunism. Um, I don’t think these students actually needed them. Jugad, which is this concept of improvisation and workarounds and sometimes cutting corners is a very real term with both positive connotations like, oh, this is just frugal innovation and negative. Uh-oh. Sorry. I’m reading my notes. Where did I cut off? Yes.

Speaker 3 [33:50]:
I got a couple of those here.

Simone Collins [33:52]:
Oh, you did. Okay, buddy. We’re almost done recording.

Speaker 3 [33:54]:
Two biggest ones.

Simone Collins [33:55]:
That is so cute. A pumpkin.

Speaker 3 [34:00]:
Aw. I got it from error Edwin’s mom. Oh, that’s pumpkin garden, and they want we have this.

Simone Collins [34:12]:
A pumpkin guy? No. A pumpkin garden. That’s a homegrown pumpkin? Yes. So pretty.

Speaker 3 [34:19]:
Some some of them has been one of these have been two of these have been eaten by a deer or little too.

Simone Collins [34:27]:
But not that one? I like that you put it in

Speaker 3 [34:29]:
palm tree. A fence. Now I will get some more buckets. We have

Malcolm Collins [34:32]:
Oh, no.

Simone Collins [34:32]:
The pumpkins we have growing are inside the fence, so we’re gonna be okay, I love you, buddy. Glad you had fun.

Speaker 3 [34:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. But, actually, I had so fun. And I got to play with some of Edwin toys at his house. Wow. That’s the best part. And one of his helicopters.

Simone Collins [34:48]:
Oh, I love the way you say helicopter.

Speaker 3 [34:50]:
Has some cool things. I

Simone Collins [34:54]:
Okay. Go on, Fred. Can I

Speaker 3 [34:55]:
have my phone? I wanna see.

Simone Collins [34:58]:
It’s on your work desk.

Speaker 3 [35:00]:
Okay. Good.

Simone Collins [35:01]:
Oh, no. No. No. Don’t sorry. Don’t go in there, though, because Tex is sleeping. So I’ll bring it down as soon as I come down. Okay? Mm-mm. No. He wakes up Tell him

Malcolm Collins [35:07]:
his game console’s on the stairwell.

Simone Collins [35:09]:
It’s not anymore, though. Oh, okay. Your your game console is on the bed in the hallway. If you’re very quiet, you can go get that. Okay?

Speaker 3 [35:16]:
Very quiet?

Simone Collins [35:17]:
Yeah. You’re you can get your game console. Okay. Yeah. So not don’t go all the way into the office where you and I work. Just to the hallway. He’s comically tiptoeing now. There he goes. Is he gonna be quiet enough? Oh, okay. Go ahead, buddy. You can do it. There he goes.

Malcolm Collins [35:45]:
Look at the comical. What is he doing? It’s not necessary.

Simone Collins [35:52]:
Anyway okay. Where was I? Right. So this this concept of Jugadh improvisation, workaround sometimes cutting corners is a real term that sometimes people view very positively. Like, you’re being frugal. You’re being innovative, but sometimes very negatively. Like, this was a half baked shortcut. You’re bending the rules. I’m and I’m sure that is kind of, like, the way that the for example, agencies that were completely missed okay. Go. Go. Go play. Go. Thank you very much. You’re extremely welcome that you can thank daddy for all that. Go enjoy your chips and your pumpkin, and I’ll see you downstairs very soon.

Speaker 3 [36:34]:
Actually, I wanna make this for Halloween.

Simone Collins [36:36]:
That’s a perfect idea.

Speaker 3 [36:38]:
This pretty soon.

Simone Collins [36:39]:
It is. Okay. Go on, friend. I love you. I’m sure, yeah, the the agency that had almost lost us, one of our top vendors, was just like, what? We’re just being creative. There’s stupid rules anyway because it was sort of this complicated way to get a flight way cheaper than you should Mhmm. That is explicitly banned by airlines, but they have to catch you or you can get away with it, basically. But they do catch you, especially when they need to make money, and these days, they’re desperate for it. Anyway, it’s a thing. Also, networking and and favoritism in some Indian tech h one b circles is very widely reported. It is just objectively true that Indian nationals dominate h one b visas. There are documented patterns of regional caste and language clustering allegations of Indian managers performing coethnics, visa holder exploitation, and at least one major law lawsuit, which I didn’t know about, with Cognizant, the company Cognizant, finding discrimination against non Indians. So immigrant ethic networks are genuinely common across groups. We’ve done whole episodes on this. Meaning that if we just wanna attribute this to Eezat, it’s it’s kinda speculative, but you could you could say it plays a role. Because, you know, we we did that episode on ethnic cartels. You know, this this this is a Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [38:04]:
This could explain how Indians act as a more effective ethnic cartel than most other ethnic cartels in terms of dominating tech companies.

Simone Collins [38:10]:
Well, no. Actually, you know, I I actually recant that. So ethnic cartels, as a little reminder Yeah. They they don’t

Malcolm Collins [38:18]:
act like a normal ethnic cartel. They act very Yeah.

Simone Collins [38:20]:
They I I will explain. An ethnic cartel is where a an ethnicity takes on an industry that is typically very, very underpaid and very unglamorous in the in in the host country. So things like running a nail salon, running a laundromat, running a donut shop, running a seven eleven, running a motel. Right? No one aspires to do this in America. And when you when the way this works is, okay. Well, this immigrant family is happy to come in and do it and also bring in through chain migration a bunch of family members that they then make work at these businesses often for under market or no pay at all because they’re basically sponsoring their immigration to a, you know, a smoother to live in country, which gives them a very real strategic economic advantage in the market, which which is how they end up being these cartels, why they are the Patel motels in these Indonesian is it Indonesian nail salons, or is it the doughnut shops? Anyway, like, they are very distinct things. But what we see with the h one b visas is instead Indians are moving to very prestigious, very in demand companies. Mhmm. And then chain migration sort of takes place from that, but

Malcolm Collins [39:31]:
not necessarily something.

Simone Collins [39:33]:
Yeah. Like Google. Yeah. So it is it is almost the opposite of an ethnic cartel where they are they’re underpaying and and undercutting the the family that they’re bringing in and working in very unprecedious. Yeah. So, actually, no. I think this is more of an Ezat thing.

Malcolm Collins [39:48]:
Yeah.

Simone Collins [39:48]:
You know what? And that that original couching came from my original Grock fact check, which I was a mistake to do. I’m not gonna do that. Have to use Rhodes now for everything.

Malcolm Collins [39:58]:
Yeah. I’m gonna be using well, I mean, we’re using the website for recording and editing these episodes now. Yeah. You know? Our fab does everything better. Oh, they’re replacing it all. If you’re still not one of the things that you should use RFAB for if you’re not is if you do vibe coding and you’re not using the RFAB API, you are being an idiot. It allows you to have the code. Like, when it reaches a point, call you and say, hey. I’m done. Even if it’s just a regular Fable model, even if you just give the Artfab API, you make a developer API on it, you give it to Fable, Fable can now call you and be like, hey. What do I do next? So you can vibe code while you’re on a walk. You can add pictures to a website like you see across the r Fab website really nicely, really easily. You can add video loading animations like we have across the r Fab website really quickly, really easily. You it can even write in a way that looks like a human wrote by using a API that we have access to that has access to, uh, human checking stuff. So it runs that automatically, and then it iteratively runs until it gets something that can’t be picked up as non AI. Sorry. As AI.

Simone Collins [41:05]:
It’s super cool. I love it. But most importantly,

Malcolm Collins [41:07]:
it’s for storytelling and and story interaction if you wanna do that. Yeah.

Simone Collins [41:10]:
Let’s get to where he’s been quite inaccurate. As as you pointed out right at the top, he did treat Indians more as a monolith and didn’t point out, for example, that Jains wouldn’t do this. Christian Indians probably wouldn’t do this, and that he just sort of was like, it’s universally practiced. And, also, it is fair to say that, like, even if you have a culture that practices is odd, that doesn’t mean that you’re gonna, like, kill someone over a garden gnome. I mean, he’s he he gets a little extreme. But he was wrong about Indians

Malcolm Collins [41:41]:
Actually, Simone, there there are a lot of killings tied to Izzat, actually.

Simone Collins [41:46]:
Well, also there’s I I don’t know. People in the thread were like, oh, this explains why this guy jumped off a cliff because he couldn’t pay his cell phone bill and things like that. I don’t I don’t know, though. I don’t know. You wanna No. I I I will get into the other part, I guess, of Okay. Yeah. Getting to the other part. Yeah. First, I wanna get to the the stuff that’s not true. That he says, oh, Indians will say, like, you can’t discuss this when, at least according to peer reviewed academic research, is not an undiscussable term. It’s it’s not one of the greatest possible insults. It appears routinely in news, literature, activism, and everyday speech. So it’s not like this unspeakable thing. And, I mean, there is also plenty of documented evidence of police addressing crimes in India. It’s not like zero crimes can ever get solved. So that’s a little extreme. But beyond what just OP says, and it’s kind of surprising that he doesn’t mention this because, typically, when when I did research on the concept of Izzat, they don’t mention any of the things he mentions. They just mentioned the honor killings. Like, you can see this one piece of peer reviewed research called, for the sake of family and tradition, honor killings in India and Pakistan, which explicitly identifies Izzat as a central framework that helps explain and justify honor killings in India and Pakistan, which are so intense. This is a quote from their abstract. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the annual worldwide number of honor killings is as as high as 5,000 women and girls, though some nongovernmental organizations estimate as many as 20,000 honor killings annually worldwide. Wow. Deeply disturbing. Also from the abstract, despite limited statistics, research shows that honored killings occur amongst women of different ages, religions, and social status, wealth, education, and location. And other experiments found that high caste rural North Indian men showed more retaliatory attitudes to slights than low caste men, admitting error can carry social cost and status conscious settings. So not just like women doing the wrong thing. And police and officials sometimes handle community matters poorly due to all of this and and fear of escalation, including against them. So I I it’s kinda funny to me that he’s like, oh, this is like it’s horrible, like, chain migration, blah blah blah. But he doesn’t mention the possibly 20,000 and at least 5,000 women and girls a year that are murdered because of this. Like, okay. I get it. Like, this is Kiwi Farms, and we’re not all about, like, violence against women or whatever. It’s too woke coded, but, like, that’s kind of a big deal, I think. Just a little. So let’s get to the point that look. All cultures are criticized on social media, and this is not about singling out Indian culture. So let me give you some examples. Here’s an African diaspora poster. He goes by Dahuti Maat Ra. He does a crying laughing face emoji three times. These people are impacted by the West and Western ways. The American environment is imbalanced and toxic, anticommunal community. They, certain blacks, are looking through western lens and not African lens. Western equals individualism. African eastern equals communalism slash family oriented. Quote, the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth, end quote. So that’s a legitimate and and and fine thing to to discuss about what

Malcolm Collins [45:21]:
you want to fine if the problem wasn’t bigger in India than in America.

Simone Collins [45:26]:
This is an African poster.

Malcolm Collins [45:28]:
Well, yeah, the the the point being is the complaint oh, he’s talking about Indians in Africa?

Simone Collins [45:34]:
No. No. No. He’s talking about this isn’t I I’m what I’m trying to say, I I’m I’m now going through a series of examples on x of people from other cultures criticizing Western culture explicitly to say that, like, this isn’t a a unidirectional thing that happens on on on x where, like, just white people sit there and dunk on other cultures. And when people do

Malcolm Collins [45:56]:
saying white people go to Africa and do bat No.

Simone Collins [46:00]:
He’s he’s trying to say that a lot of black people are in spoiled, impacted by Western individualism, which is, in his view, a a blight upon society, as

Malcolm Collins [46:17]:
he says. Wow. Yeah. It leads to such terrible societies with such low rates of crime and murder and corruption, and we Well, look.

Simone Collins [46:26]:
Japan is very collectivist, and they are an extremely safe much safer than The United States country. So, you know, it can work for some people. Some people wear it well.

Malcolm Collins [46:36]:
You know, we don’t we don’t have murder vans that come to

Simone Collins [46:38]:
your house. That’s that’s a China thing. That’s not a Japan thing. Oh, Japan. I said Japan. Japan. Okay. But here’s here’s another example. This is an Indonesian Chinese poster with some kind of kanji and then saying, ironically, instead of empowering a person, individualism is more likely to destroys a person’s purpose in life. You don’t have to you don’t have any goal except worldly hedonism. Don’t ask again why so many folks are easily depressed and become antisocial when this is the value of your society. He’s pointing to someone’s post reading society is based on self interest. So, again, like, both Africans and Indonesian people

Malcolm Collins [47:23]:
objectively wrong. The more individualistic parts of Europe and America are the more economically and technologically productive.

Simone Collins [47:31]:
And I appreciate that you’re saying that because you’re like, this is a discourse that we can have instead of saying, wow. Look at that racist African. Wow. Look at that racist Indonesian Chinese person because this isn’t about racism. This is a discourse on what works better for society. Is individualism better or or is collectivism better? Right. Instead of going straight to identity politics, you’re like, no. Let’s look at what’s downstream of individualistic or collectivist cultures and have a discourse about it. And that’s exactly the point I’m trying to make. When people attack Western culture, it isn’t like, how dare you attack our culture? It’s more like, I don’t know. What produces the best results? Maybe we can work at it from that perspective. One video posted by at Vera Booty, who’s a Canadian Chinese man, often labeled the Chinese historian in the replies, walks through how Western hookup and drinking culture wrecks family formation and women’s long term outcomes. He links casual sex in campus, date rape, alcohol fuel decisions, one night stands, etcetera.

Malcolm Collins [48:26]:
Let’s let’s see how China is doing on that stuff. How is China doing in family formation?

Simone Collins [48:31]:
Culture is actually pretty intense. It’s weird. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [48:34]:
No. Mean, China is, like, strictly worse in family formation than the West.

Simone Collins [48:38]:
I get I get it. This is true. But you’re not like, oh my god. He’s racist against Westerns. You’re actually like, no. This is a genuine problem. Like, drinking and hookup culture is, I agree, not good. And look. You also suffer from it. So let’s all talk about how to get over it. And those there also are Indian accounts that repeatedly frame Western culture as the vector that broke, as they put it, family discipline. Here is Ishbat one nine seven saying, it’s all because of following blindly to Western culture. Families are broken. No morals. No values. Freedom. Fake feminism. Also, doctor van Nostrand, r s d two seventy, wrote, this entire thing, such shows, the kind of humor this dating and hookup culture is all adopted under peer pressure from the West. This doesn’t come naturally to our society, and it shows only those unswayed by this will survive in the long run. Rest will drown in degeneracy. So they’re going as DJs. And we agree with that. It’s like we’re like, okay. That’s a valid criticism from an Indian poster on x. So there’s another one, Shalputhri, quarter life crisis, that is to say at shaliputri g d wrote

Malcolm Collins [49:49]:
You don’t need to say all their names. Sorry.

Simone Collins [49:53]:
She quote tweeted someone saying, dear women, never ever, I repeat, never ever discuss your past with your husband or your would be husband. Some things need to go with you to your grave, or else there’s such a big chance your partner will make sure he digs a living grave for you with whatever you shared with him out of pure honesty and trust. No one has the maturity to understand relationships and the life choices of a woman. And then she uses some hashtags indicating that some woman was honored, killed by a man, which is already kind of a self own of your own culture. But she retweeted that saying, Western feminism brought Indian women about sexual liberation but failed to impart them the Faustian with this Faustian spirit of Anglo feminism, white women hoed openly and didn’t give a fuck about what society thought of them. While meanwhile, women here wanna ho and still be perceived as Sattisavitri, which I guess is probably some like

Malcolm Collins [50:45]:
She was she basically, she’s saying, I wanna hoe so bad. Why can’t I Well,

Simone Collins [50:49]:
she no. She’s basically saying, like so one one woman posted, basically, women never tell your husband about your sexual history because he probably will honor kill you. And then another Indian poster is like, no. Indian women are being corrupted by Western culture, which is making them slutty, and it’s Western culture’s fault, um, not the fault

Malcolm Collins [51:09]:
of the culture. Wants to be slutty. Like, the way she wrote that didn’t come off like, there’s there’s posters who write things like what you just said.

Simone Collins [51:18]:
Uh-huh.

Malcolm Collins [51:19]:
Okay? She didn’t write it that way. She wrote it like, why can’t I be more why isn’t the West doing more to protect us so we can be sluttier?

Simone Collins [51:27]:
Oh, dear. No. No. No. Well, I mean, the first one was, but not the second one. The the one who quoted Peter Dre.

Malcolm Collins [51:33]:
The second one. Yeah.

Simone Collins [51:36]:
But yeah. I mean, so we absolutely own that hookup culture is bad, and we would probably fight back against critiques about individualism, but we would never say that a critique of American or Western individualism is unwarranted or something that we’re not ready to discuss. This concept of, like, not being discuss this. Yeah. Yeah. Like, how how dare you accuse Indians of this concept of izat and and and hate it that’s racist is is toxic because it is I mean, so think about it this way. Like, I don’t think you or I will be comfortable doing business with recent Indian immigrants for a very long time. And that’s pretty screwed up because we’ve had the tens of thousands of dollars stolen from businesses when we chose to trust and then trust again, And that’s pretty screwed up. And if we could instead have open discussions about these dynamics I mean, one, like, if I knew about this to begin with, we could have designed our commercial arrangements in a way that would have prevented the risk from taking place in the first place.

Malcolm Collins [52:45]:
Yeah. Well and we wouldn’t trust I mean, I think the biggest takeaway from us is that I would never trust an Indian twice now. Like, the idea of, like, you trust them once they screw you over, and then you give them a second chance, and they screw you over again. Uh-huh. Like, there’s no point in giving the second chance. Exactly. Like, that’s a that’s a much bigger and more specific thing. That and then just vet them and put them in positions where they can make fewer like, bad actions. Exactly. But, like, that’s not a place that you want to be, but it’s a place you have to be when we do business with people from everywhere on earth. And I I think, actually, every one of our Indian clients has done something illegal, uh, eventually. I don’t think we’ve ever had one that didn’t.

Simone Collins [53:23]:
That is correct. Uh, for the travel business, at least. I don’t think I’ve I mean, so to to be clear, these were all first gen generation immigrants or actively in India.

Malcolm Collins [53:37]:
Yeah.

Simone Collins [53:37]:
So I think we’ve done a lot of work with Indians in general, but we didn’t see them as Indians because they were fully Americanized, if that makes sense. So we were like, we’re not doing business with an Indian. We’re doing business with an American. So we wouldn’t have, like, mentally classified them that way. But this was different because these were very clearly in India and or first generation. Yeah. But yeah. That it was, yeah, it was it was just it was so pervasive. It was one of those things of, like, this can’t be happening. Right? Like, they’re not allowed to do this. You you’re not allowed to stereotype like that, are you? Isn’t there, like, a law against that? You know? Like, I thought you couldn’t anyway.

Malcolm Collins [54:18]:
But, you know, stereotypes exist for a reason. Right? And

Simone Collins [54:22]:
Oh, that’s the problem is is if we can’t talk about that, if we can’t talk about patterns or systemic issues that take place with certain groups, one, we can’t criticize them to the point of maybe eradicating them because they’re not doing favors to those groups. Again, the point I was trying to make

Malcolm Collins [54:37]:
the problems, not the groups.

Simone Collins [54:39]:
It’s like, what if you are a recent Indian immigrant who’s trying to get off your feet in a new country and you mean well, and no one is willing to work with you because everyone who came before you who is from your country burned every your entire cultural reputation? Know, You what if when what if you, for example, are like a Jain or a Christian Indian who also doesn’t practice Right? Like but, clearly, as is shown here, people are like, all India, every single last Indian practices is odd and will screw you over forever or zero sum, blah blah blah. Like, that sucks for them. But because we can’t talk about it pervasively, a bunch of people are gonna hold that view because we’re not talking

Malcolm Collins [55:20]:
about nuance. That that Indians need to understand. Like, you’re like, where is all this? Hey. If you understand American culture, when you push back on reasonable criticisms in American culture, that makes the topic bigger. That makes people talk

Simone Collins [55:35]:
louder sound

Malcolm Collins [55:36]:
effect. And more aggressively. Yeah. It’s not just a Streisand effect. It’s it’s it’s bigger. I I think on a cultural level, it’s something bigger and louder than the Streisand effect. You bet. Any group that says, you’re not allowed to talk about x thing that I’m doing. That’s like a negative externality for society.

Simone Collins [55:52]:
Mhmm.

Malcolm Collins [55:53]:
To white Americans and and not even just white more broadly. Because, like, I know that Leaflet feels this as well. It’s it’s anyone who’s adopted American culture. We typically are just like, that multiplies whatever the issue is. That’s why I know the Tyler Olivier poop video. Right? I don’t follow him. I would have no reason to know about that. I know about it because people tried to complain about it and shut it down.

Simone Collins [56:16]:
Oh, yes. And then, of course, you need to know what it is. Well, I need to know what

Malcolm Collins [56:20]:
talk about it.

Simone Collins [56:20]:
Right? I need to be mad.

Speaker 3 [56:21]:
You can

Malcolm Collins [56:22]:
be incensed. How could they do that? Yeah.

Simone Collins [56:24]:
That’s fair. Well, I guess maybe it’s it’s something like when you smell potential hypocrisy, you get, like, super I don’t know if that’s a uniquely Western thing. I think it might it might just be a

Speaker 3 [56:34]:
Well, yeah.

Malcolm Collins [56:34]:
It’s it’s part of American culture. I think the the part yeah. The the the it’s part of, like, Wild West culture. It’s part of Backwoods culture. It’s part of it, like, a large swath of American culture. And we just love yeah. Like, you you you wanna be, like, flies to poop. Like, love talking about that stuff, and it always it’s like a proportional response thing. You try to shut down a reasonable conversation, you get a proportional response multiplicatively above the first response.

Simone Collins [57:05]:
Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [57:07]:
And a lot of groups just don’t get this. And I I I have a fear that any of this might be one of them because they don’t understand if if they keep addressing this the way that it’s been addressed because I’ve talked about this with Jews addressing things poorly as well in in a similar context. Anti Indian sentiment in The US is going to become extremely mainstream. And I think it might be

Simone Collins [57:31]:
too late for that. I mean, at least in Canada, it’s way too late for that. And I think a lot of that might be downstream of the groups that were immigrating en masse because I think specifically it had to do with a lot of of functionally not honoring the spirit of the law around getting a degree in order to get residency. Like, people were just going to, like, diploma mill scam unis instead of actually studying and trying to bring something to the country. And then it brought sort of the wrong type of person. Like, not someone who’s looking to work hard, but someone instead who was just looking to kind of cheat the system. So So I think maybe that’s why India Speed ran or sorry. Canada speed ran anti Indian immigrant sentiment because they got a totally different group than what The United States has been getting since, like, the late eighties. I I mean, I don’t know. Like, I grew up with friends in the in the early nineties who were whose parents were recent Indian immigrants, and they were amazing, you know, like, biotech workers, amazing people, but also, like, definitely early, like, fresh off the boat kind of immigrants. Because that’s was my friend, one of my friends, for example, who had her arranged marriage, and she was, like, in the third grade. I’m like, oh, okay. I mean, you gotta take these things at face value in the third grade. You’re like, yeah. Right. Of course. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [58:53]:
And you’re you’re well, we’re we’re we’ve gotta learn from that. We gotta find some arranged marriages for our kids.

Simone Collins [58:57]:
I know. See, the look. It anyway, that’s only third

Malcolm Collins [59:00]:
grade classmate who got married other than

Simone Collins [59:02]:
Still happily married? Honestly. No. Because the Mormon’s married too, and she has three or four lovely kids. So, yeah, my Mormon elementary school friend is married. Oh, actually and then another one. Asian immigrant parents because one kid.

Malcolm Collins [59:19]:
So only the only the immigrant kid?

Simone Collins [59:20]:
Mormon Mormon friend, four kids. I think that the arranged marriage friend has no kids. I haven’t seen at least any in social media. Yeah. Interesting ranges. Very interesting ranges. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [59:36]:
Anyway Alright. Well, I appreciate you bringing this up, Simone. I found this to be a very fascinating topic. I want you to get to bed as soon as you can. Yeah. I’m. Simone, one, keep in mind, they said you should expect blood. Okay?

Simone Collins [59:50]:
They did. They did. It’s just it also really hurts, and it’s gushing. And so it still makes me nervous. Right? Like, they told me this was gonna happen. So I’m not, like, freaking out. I’m not like we need to go somewhere. But, you know, no one wants this to happen because it it’s it’s very disconcerting.

Malcolm Collins [60:10]:
I I know the cramping is scary, but I remember you experiencing cramping in the last early pregnancy as well. And I I know it’s but there’s nothing we can do. Right? Like, all we can do is get you to bed as early as possible. How how can I help with the kids? What can I do to help tonight?

Simone Collins [60:28]:
Just really, really help with getting them up. I mean, it’s really dinner super easy time because I’m just, like, reheating leftovers for everyone. So I’m just gonna do that super fast. I’m just gonna hope that they don’t require extremely violent wrangling for a bath because that typically is required every

Malcolm Collins [60:45]:
single day. That’s an issue, then you calm me down, and I will handle it.

Simone Collins [60:49]:
Yeah. Because it’s really

Malcolm Collins [60:50]:
Simone Like, I don’t know if I

Simone Collins [60:52]:
can stand up right now.

Malcolm Collins [60:53]:
Seriously, I will handle it. Okay? Thank you.

Simone Collins [60:57]:
Thank you a lot. Because it’s it’s, like, distracting levels of pain. I think maybe I’m being such a I’m being a a wimp about this because I don’t usually get, like, bad cramping with periods. And then so this is I’m like, what is this? This is this is what women experience. Anyway, alright. I gotta go, and I love you very

Malcolm Collins [61:16]:
much. You too.

Simone Collins [61:17]:
Thanks for helping me out. I really appreciate it. So fried rice tonight? Fried rice. Fried

Malcolm Collins [61:23]:
rice. Nothing better.

Simone Collins [61:25]:
I mean, that’s it’s like it’s designed as a leftover food. I mean, it’s supposed to be started with leftover rice and leftover ingredients, then, you know

Malcolm Collins [61:34]:
And Octavian has discovered that he just loves lo mein.

Simone Collins [61:38]:
I’m so glad. I’m glad that he’s at least one of our adventurous children. Unlike those who you know, Indy, for such a long time, would just try anything, and she was so ganky in the way she ate her food. And then suddenly, she just has decided performatively because she likes to be rebellious now that everything’s disgusting. Like, she used to wolf down our homemade popcorn. I gave it to her last night, she’s like, It was just like performative.

Malcolm Collins [62:08]:
I bet she just loves being a dick. Like She

Simone Collins [62:11]:
yes. Because she’s so sweet, like, by nature that it’s like she’s discovered some new technology. Like, what is this strange witchcraft that I can do that is I can be cruel. Amazing. She’ll she’ll look at me when I’m changing her diaper, and she’ll say, you are a poopy head.

Malcolm Collins [62:32]:
Yeah. A poopy head. Poopy head. Picking it up from her brothers and sisters.

Simone Collins [62:36]:
You know it. And I’ve got them to stop saying it because I’m like, I do the, you know, the the third law of physics, which is I am rubber your clue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks onto you. That if you call someone a poopy head, that means you’re a poopy head. But Indi, being two years old, doesn’t know that. And so she just looks me in the eye with the sweetest little smile saying, you are a poopy head. But so the way she says everything is just so cute. My diaper change.

Malcolm Collins [63:05]:
My diaper change. Is a b. Actually, bottle. That’s actually bottle. Anyway

Simone Collins [63:11]:
alright. Are you ready for this?

Malcolm Collins [63:13]:
I I yeah. Let’s get racist here.

Simone Collins [63:15]:
Oh god. I don’t know what I’m gonna do with us. We really are speedrunning YouTube again.

Malcolm Collins [63:21]:
Anyway We’re not saying anything that’s not true. We’re exploring genuinely other cultures in in ways that are brash and sometimes border on insensitive, but I think are for the sake of of humor and delivering these ideas to an audience that otherwise wouldn’t find them palatable.

Simone Collins [63:37]:
No. That otherwise, it is like, these these are human trash. We need to destroy them. We need to Remember those really great orb lights we used to have in Peru?

Malcolm Collins [63:49]:
What lights?

Simone Collins [63:50]:
Those orb lights that would glow and change color are so cool. They’re very durable.

Malcolm Collins [63:59]:
Oh, yeah. I do remember those. Those are

Simone Collins [64:00]:
Big and plastic and super cool.

Malcolm Collins [64:03]:
We should get some for the kids room?

Simone Collins [64:04]:
I yeah. Because they keep disassembling and breaking every single light that’s in there and any other light they have access to. Like, you know, the two lights in the sunroom and the kitchen, the ones that are

Malcolm Collins [64:13]:
You have my permission. You have my permission.

Simone Collins [64:15]:
They’re even somehow able to damage the lights hanging from the steel. I’m gonna wait for prime day. We’re sort of on a we’re not buying anything again until Prime Day or sorry. Cyber Monday or whatever. You know, when Amazon goes crazy around things

Malcolm Collins [64:28]:
like For Octavian and Torsten, do look at booking them in for camp. Books this far in advance? Yes. It is very hard to get in. It books far in advance. You have to do an application. The kids have to do an application. It’s not a, oh, they just go because my dad’s willing to pay for them. Right? Like

Simone Collins [64:50]:
I’m picturing that scene from Legally Blonde with our kids in the hot tub being like,

Malcolm Collins [64:56]:
oh, we’re we’re perfect for this camp. That’s that’s so stressful.

Simone Collins [65:02]:
Man, bougie parents must really My cousins eat

Malcolm Collins [65:06]:
their lives. My my no. No. Sorry. Nieces and nephews actually didn’t get in.

Simone Collins [65:11]:
To Camp Seagull or Camp Longhorn?

Malcolm Collins [65:13]:
Seagull Seagull. Of course, they got into Longhorn because of all the Collins family. But Camp Seagull yeah. Like, Camp Seagull’s hard to

Simone Collins [65:19]:
get into. It’s the Harvard of summer camps.

Malcolm Collins [65:22]:
The Harvard of summer camps. I life has just been too posh.

Simone Collins [65:27]:
It’s disgusting. What did you you you what do you do there? You sail to what? Do you play lacrosse? Do you I mean, of course, collect antiques? Go petitions.

Malcolm Collins [65:36]:
You sail on antiques. Literally, that is one of the things you do is sail on an antique schooner. Okay? Like, whatever. You can check it out yourself too with just the other kids.

Simone Collins [65:47]:
You disgust me. Oh, I hate bananas. They were all over my island when I was a. You I there’s no there are no words. There are no words. Um, anyway

Malcolm Collins [66:02]:
Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. At least I didn’t inherit any money. Okay?

Simone Collins [66:05]:
I’m just like The deposed prince. That’s how it’s oh, yeah. At least. At least.

Malcolm Collins [66:09]:
You get the full narrative arc. You get the full narrative arc

Simone Collins [66:14]:
to make the arc bounces in the other direction before the entire outside of our house rots. Speaking of begging for

Malcolm Collins [66:21]:
money on Patreon, we do offer weekend episodes and would love to see you guys on Patreon or Substack.

Simone Collins [66:28]:
Actually, yeah, we have a lot of fun with weekend episodes. They’re super fun. And thank you for everyone who subscribes. Like, we you guys are awesome, and we like emailing with you. And oh, is it okay if I book a hangout for this weekend? I need to book our

Malcolm Collins [66:41]:
Yes. You may well, keep in mind that I am doing a leaflet call this Friday.

Simone Collins [66:45]:
Friday. But what if we do it Sunday?

Malcolm Collins [66:47]:
It’s fine if you don’t do it Friday again.

Simone Collins [66:50]:
Okay. Okay. I won’t do it again. I promise. Look. I I did anyway, long story. We’re not gonna go into it. Shall we? You ready?

Malcolm Collins [66:59]:
We shall. And I am ready.

Simone Collins [67:02]:
You better hit me with the not ready.

Malcolm Collins [67:03]:
Racism fire hose like you did on that last one looking at the firsthand accounts from aid workers. Yeah. Jesus. I was like, oh my god. Simone, what are you doing? You cannot You’re the one who kept calling being an aid worker in South America easy mode. South. Easy mode in comparison to what?

Simone Collins [67:32]:
Well, I said in the episode that I got groped more in China than I ever was harassed in South America, and I certainly got hit on that in Italy.

Malcolm Collins [67:38]:
Been in relation to China.

Simone Collins [67:41]:
I did, literally. I haven’t traveled in Africa aside from briefly with you, and we were so isolated. It didn’t matter. So that doesn’t count. You know? Like, it it really doesn’t count. Anyway, we’ll get into it. Here we go

Speaker 6 [67:53]:
Cats. Oh, really? Does she have puppies? Just like it. Right there? They’re so cute. Does she take care of animals? Yeah. Do you really like her? Mommy. Oh.

They walk through:

• What Uncle Tom actually does in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel vs. what “Uncle Tom” means now

• Cakewalk as plantation satire of white ballroom dance — and the line from that rhythm into ragtime, jazz, R&B, and rock

• Minstrel structure as the ancestor of standup, the sitcom, and a lot of classic American slapstick

• Brer Rabbit / Uncle Remus as West African trickster tradition (Anansi/hare) fused with Jack tales — and why replacing Splash Mountain with The Princess and the Frog trades one set of problems for another

• Banjo origins, tap’s African + Irish fusion, “tar baby,” family-barbecue “caricatures,” and how labeling ordinary Black life as a racist stereotype pushed later generations toward the opposite

• Why they think groups that treated every racially adjacent artifact as radioactive helped create a cultural vacuum later filled by gangster/rap identity

Provocative, heavily historical, and not YouTube-algorithm-friendly. Watch at your own risk.

RFab (editing, research, companions): https://rfab.ai/

Episode Transcript

Malcolm Collins [0:00]:
Hello, Simone. Recently, Target has been in hot water because they decided to release blackface as a Halloween costume.

Simone Collins [0:08]:
Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Malcolm Collins [0:09]:
They’d say this was by accident, but it is it’s hilarious. But I wanted to take this opportunity. So we’ll go into this incident. But what’s more interesting is I wanna take this opportunity to explore how erasing blackface and mistrial shows from America’s memory and cultural identity was the tool that was used to erase most of black culture. And when I say this, people will think, oh, he’s exaggerating.

Simone Collins [0:48]:
No. They’ll think, oh, he’s speedrunning a YouTube ban, I guess.

Malcolm Collins [0:54]:
What are you doing? So I we I guess we’ll call it the uncle Tom effect is what I’ll call this. So when you hear No.

Simone Collins [1:02]:
Let’s call it the Aunt Jemima effect. Come on. She was our woman. She was our lady.

Malcolm Collins [1:06]:
Uncle Tom’s a much better example. When you hear the term uncle Tom, what do you think? Somebody calls someone an uncle Tom. Okay. What they are saying is that they are not a good black person. They are somebody who kowtows to white people. They are somebody who is obsequious to white people and tries to fit in with white society. Okay?

Simone Collins [1:30]:
Okay. I’m looking up uncle Tom’s cat.

Malcolm Collins [1:31]:
So uncle Tom in the book is a character who dies protecting black people attempting to escape slavery.

Simone Collins [1:41]:
Okay. Great way to go. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s an antislavery Yes. Oh, yeah. The antislavery novel it’s by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Malcolm Collins [1:47]:
She was a But it’s not like the character is poorly written or anything. The book became one of the most popular books in American history. The character is introduced. He saves a white girl from drowning. He is then, sold to a very mean slave driver.

Simone Collins [2:02]:
Yeah. Away from his wife and children.

Malcolm Collins [2:04]:
So Away from his wife and children. And then he ends up being beaten to death, saving two other black women who were attempting to escape. And his last words are wishing to protect the the for for mercy on the people person who’s beating him to death. And it’s very clearly like a Jesus analogy. Right? Now this is not a figure that should be shamed in black culture. This is not a figure whose name should be associated with shame.

Simone Collins [2:33]:
No. I mean, it’s it’s a figure who was clearly mistreated by white slave owners. So

Malcolm Collins [2:38]:
He’s one of the most important figures, literary figures in blacks being freed from slavery to begin with. I and so

Simone Collins [2:47]:
why would he say why yeah. How?

Malcolm Collins [2:48]:
His name becomes synonymous if you talk to a black teen today

Simone Collins [2:53]:
Okay.

Malcolm Collins [2:54]:
With turning on black people.

Simone Collins [2:56]:
Right? Real? Oh, yeah. Know Victor Stowe was white. Okay. Sorry. Anyway, maybe that’s the problem.

Malcolm Collins [3:00]:
This is what we are going to continue to see, this particular effect around all of these critical moments of black history, if you remove the minstrel shows, you remove cakewalking. If you remove cakewalking, then you remove the

Simone Collins [3:17]:
link. Cakewalking? It’s a cakewalking. Is it is it an expression meaning that it’s easy?

Malcolm Collins [3:24]:
No. Cakewalking was a style of dancing that African slaves did. Now today, it’s considered very offensive, and no one does it because the very name of it came from the concept of, we will have the slaves come and dance against each other for a piece of cake that the master would give them.

Simone Collins [3:41]:
Oh, yeah. A a cakewalk is a nineteenth century African American partner dance that originated on Southern plantations, which also evolved into a modern idiom and a digital music software name. Okay. I okay. I just didn’t know.

Speaker 3 [3:53]:
I’m gonna get fancy now. Keep on swinging.

Simone Collins [4:19]:
I just heard cakewalk. Like, oh, it would be so easy.

Malcolm Collins [4:21]:
To be a cakewalk. Well, yeah, the the that that also the modern idiom is easy as a cakewalk became, like, what the slave owners said because they they’d looked too derisively at these. They would, you know, it was, like, entertainment for them to have the blacks do the cakewalk. But, anyway, so you Oh, it’s a cute dance. If you remove cakewalking from the cultural history, you remove the descendant forms of music that came from cake walking

Simone Collins [4:46]:
Oh.

Malcolm Collins [4:47]:
Which include ragtime, jazz Oh, ragtime’s great. Rock and roll. No. Basically, form of American music evolved from the cakewalk dances that were constructed. And so blacks can say, wait. Why did we erase this? It’s like, well, because clearly a racist derogatory thing they were doing. And it’s the same thing that happened with uncle Tom’s Cabin. So with uncle Tom’s Cabin, they began to hold Tom shows. Right? And this was the stage play production of uncle Tom’s cabin.

Simone Collins [5:22]:
Oh, okay. In the stage to Broadway. That’s great.

Malcolm Collins [5:25]:
Productions of uncle Tom’s cabin, you ended up having the the the characters would begin to act more comedically or more in ways that represented normal black tropes. And so they would act obsequiously. They would act in a way that where the uncle Tom moniker might make sense. And so black culture began to use the evoked set, what they had seen more recently, the stage play, instead of the critical character that sparked a huge part of the abolition movement. Wow. And they then denigrated the entire line because of this one connection to actual racism. Take something like the Mistral Show. If you take people are familiar with the Mistral Show where black people were well, first, it began with whites doing in blackface sort of caricatures that were derogatory of black people on stage. And then these evolved into often not necessarily derogatory, but endearing caricatures and caricatures which were the ancestor of huge amounts of what we today think of as the three stooges, for example. Most comedy of this period was done in the style that was pioneered by the minstrel show.

Simone Collins [6:57]:
And hold on. If I I’ll check this, but weren’t minstrel shows originally things that took place in England and Europe that, you know, there would be traveling minstrels, and they would make jokes around prevailing tropes at that time. So it’s kind

Malcolm Collins [7:12]:
of equal for the point being is is when you’re like, oh, this is a racist against black thing.

Simone Collins [7:17]:
No. No. No. This existed before slavery, like, black slavery in The United States. Right?

Malcolm Collins [7:21]:
Yeah. The the the it’s like when you have the NAACCP fighting to take down Andy and Amos, which a third of Americans watched at its height, which had caricatures that at its time were not dissimilar to the caricatures white comedians were playing. For example, the three stooges. For example, I could I’ll go through a list later of numerous white comedians that did similar bits, but it was just normal at the time. And it removed a huge amount of black representation, but then also removed the link in American history where you don’t see that this form of the the minstrel shows that did have racism in them, but it also launched the careers of the first major black actors in America. It also launched the first black theatrical company in America. It also brought black people to Broadway for the first time in America. and it it style that it pioneered later became the American sitcom. It later became the American night show.

Simone Collins [8:32]:
And I guess trying to erase that or disassociate them from any form of blackness removes both black credit and black influence, but also very positive connotations and and performances from black artists.

Malcolm Collins [8:46]:
Right. And what’s what’s worse is that black history the this is this is the bigger part, is that groups like the NAACP and WHO have been like, we’re gonna erase everything that is tied to racism. And it’s like, bro, black American culture is tied to racism. And when I say it’s tied to racism, it’s tied to racism that flowed both ways. If you wanna get

Simone Collins [9:13]:
an understanding what

Malcolm Collins [9:14]:
I mean by this, do you know how blacks developed the musical style that went alongside cakewalks and the cakewalk itself?

Simone Collins [9:24]:
They

Malcolm Collins [9:26]:
saw white people dancing in, like, a ballroom style dances, and they thought it was funny. And so

Simone Collins [9:32]:
So it’s them making fun of white people? Because that’s what it kinda looks like.

Malcolm Collins [9:35]:
Yes. That’s exactly what it is. The cakewalk is the black version of a mistrial show

Simone Collins [9:41]:
Of a known people. That’s It really great.

Malcolm Collins [9:44]:
It’s each group iteratively doing a minstrel show of each other.

Simone Collins [9:49]:
Yeah. Making fun of each other. Yeah. And let’s just to be clear, renaissance minstrels go back to the twelfth century.

Malcolm Collins [9:57]:
Right. But the point being

Simone Collins [9:59]:
I just wanna be clear on that.

Malcolm Collins [10:00]:
Is to understand and to truly appreciate the way that America was able to develop this huge slew of artistic, thematic, and theatrical styles isn’t that necessarily black people or musical geniuses or something like that. Right? It’s or black culture is uniquely rich in, theatrical or musical tradition. It’s that having two cultures constantly and aggressively riffing off of each other allowed for expansion of musical and theatrical styles. And that is what gave us the diversity that allowed America to culturally conquer the world, and black people’s role in that has been erased by trying to dissociate. Because when you think about it, something like blackface more broadly that allowed for this explosion in black descended cultural groups. It was attached to racism, but it wasn’t attached to the type of aggressive racism that we now associate blackface with. Right? Like, it’s not the same. It doesn’t have the same history as the n word. It doesn’t have the same history as slavery. It was, I guess, closer to the cakewalk, you could say. Right? Like, one group being like, the way this other group is doing things looks ridiculous to me. Let’s re redo it and add a bunch of, like, cultural flares to it. And this is where you get the true horror of this and how it left when when you as a black person couldn’t be proud of all these genuine cultural achievements because those were tied to racism, they had to invent new history. And this is where you see the beginning of the modern black culture that came out of the rap industry in, like, the nineteen eighties and stuff like that because this is when they had finally won all the victories. This is when Andy and Amos is finally off the air. This is when all of their connections to their actual history had been cut down, and they’re like the NAACCP, I imagine, being like the once ler, having cut down the the the Lorax being there, stop. Stop shutting down every part of genuine black history that this country has. and then there’s nothing left. It’s a desert. And look at our video if you wanna see the results of this called the zombification of black culture where we go over how blacks went from having out of children a child out of marriages at a rate half that of rights. It was only at 5% when whites with it 10% to a rate that’s, like, seventy eight percent. Like, in in just a few decades as well. It really happened over a fairly short time period, the destruction of black culture once you erase this history. And, you you see it because, Simone, you may not understand how severe it is or how grotesque it is, but look. It’s happening with Splash Mountain. So Splash Mountain

Simone Collins [12:55]:
Oh, it got turned into Tiana’s adventure or whatever, by your adventure.

Malcolm Collins [13:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So do you I’m just wondering. Was your, like, brief understanding of history. Do you understand how absolutely grotesque that is?

Simone Collins [13:08]:
That they got rid of Splash Mountain?

Malcolm Collins [13:10]:
Right. Because Oh my gosh.

Simone Collins [13:12]:
I follow all these, like, Disney vloggers and stuff. Yeah. It was seen as a travesty. This was a piece of Disney history.

Malcolm Collins [13:18]:
No. No. That’s not why it’s important.

Simone Collins [13:20]:
Okay. Why?

Malcolm Collins [13:22]:
What is Splash Mountain based on?

Simone Collins [13:24]:
Oh, like Appalachian culture and Briar Rabbit.

Malcolm Collins [13:28]:
Splash Mountain is based on Briar Rabbit.

Simone Collins [13:31]:
Yeah. A Jacktail. Briar Rabbit. I know. I I I just said I just said

Malcolm Collins [13:35]:
Well, Briar Rabbit is not from Appalachian culture. Isn’t it? No. It was influenced and twisted a bit by the Jacktails archetypes, but Briar Rabbit was a, ethnologist who went around to enslaved black communities and collected all of their local mythology. Oh. And then he built that mythology into a series of children’s books. Those children’s books are the Briar Rabbit mythology. Briar Rabbit about a Carbaby.

Simone Collins [14:06]:
Connections. Why they had to cancel it?

Malcolm Collins [14:09]:
No. No. It’s not why they had to connect. Briar Rabbit had direct connections to African genuine African myth. Tales?

Simone Collins [14:18]:
Oh my gosh. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So they they erased a ride that was themed around genuine African folk tales with a ride that was, like, some weirdly I mean, I I like I like Tiana. She’s a good character.

Malcolm Collins [14:34]:
But the princess and the toad is a European folktale. Oh my god. You’re right. Oh, that’s bad.

Simone Collins [14:40]:
Oh, no. No.

Malcolm Collins [14:42]:
It’s worse than you think. Because you know the type of music that they played on the ride before?

Simone Collins [14:49]:
Good banjo music.

Malcolm Collins [14:52]:
Banjo music. Do you

Simone Collins [14:53]:
know what the banjo is? I don’t know. But you’re gonna say it’s black, but

Malcolm Collins [14:58]:
I thought it was a African instrument that was brought over by the slaves and placed on plantations. No way.

Simone Collins [15:06]:
Hold on. Origins of banjo. The oh my gosh. The modern banjo was created by enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean and colonial North America drawing on West Africans’ gourd bodied loot traditions. Of course, it’s shaped like a

Malcolm Collins [15:23]:
oh my god. The entire ride was one of the most authentic Oh, no. Back to true African. True black history. Oh my god. Would have.

Simone Collins [15:38]:
But, like, we’re I didn’t they got they got rid of it because I think people were accusing Disneyland of it it’s racist. They’re like, this ride’s racist. We can’t although there was nothing about it.

Malcolm Collins [15:48]:
Said it was racist because of the character that would use as the framing device for the Briar Rabbit stories was an enslaved man telling these stories to a white child.

Simone Collins [16:01]:
Oh, for ah, FFS.

Malcolm Collins [16:03]:
And they said this is an offensive story.

Simone Collins [16:06]:
No. No. No. No. Okay. I remember this. Splash Mountain was changed to remove its association with the controversial 1946 Disney film song of the South. Because don’t forget that at the very end, they played zippity doo dah. But I’m I guess the formerly enslaved man you’re talking about is the character in song of the south, which I remember saying No.

Malcolm Collins [16:25]:
I’ll go read this is the character. This is the guy. The guy who has

Simone Collins [16:29]:
who is He’s a bit of your doorman.

Malcolm Collins [16:31]:
A positive relationship. And note here, I I wanna be very clear about this. Yeah. When you eradicate any view of real black history, real black history involved many, many instances of loving, genuinely paternal relationships between slaves and white children. Okay? There are many instances in which a sweet slave who genuinely had nothing but love for a particular child told them stories that were passed down from parent to child all the way back to Africa. And I think when you look at the popularity of something like Briar Rabbit even among white southern culture, these were stories I was read as a kid. They were stories Totally. I was deeply familiar with as a kid. Yeah. They represent the moment that was captured in that movie. But that

Simone Collins [17:31]:
moment just that too. It’s like, I remember from my childhood watching old, like, Shirley Temple movies, and there there were definitely similar characters in some of those movies. Like, just a really nice, both, like, older black men and older black women. And that definitely, for, like, me as a kid, shaped the way that I probably came to subconsciously view black people as, like, oh, these are really nice people. Like, I don’t know the baggage or history, it just a positive.

Malcolm Collins [17:56]:
The tropes that were available to black people. When you tell a black person, you can’t when you grow up feeling this way, you can’t have a positive relationship with a white child. That’s racist. Yeah. Then you invent rap culture. Then you invent the anti police culture. Then you invent the crime culture.

Simone Collins [18:16]:
These things Yeah. What’s sad is oh, what’s that movie? The the the The Help. There’s the movie The Help that does depict a modern relationship between a black nanny slash housemaid in the nineteen sixties, nineteen fifties South and a white child who’s her charge. And she’s really sweet. They have a really sweet relationship, but the only way that they are able to make that work in the movie is that the mother is dismissive and abusive toward her child. You remember where she’s like, you are kind, you are important, etcetera. Like, keeps saying these sweet affirmations to the child because the child is constantly demeaned by her mother. So the only way they were able to make that relationship look positive is by making the mother an absolute monster, which is that’s really sad. That and, well, and, of course, the whole movie was about racial tensions. I I understand, Saba. But the point here being

Malcolm Collins [19:05]:
Oh. The wider point I’m making is this Okay. The song of the South as a movie captured the truth of how black culture ended up influencing what today is American culture, what today is Pan American culture.

Simone Collins [19:21]:
Yeah. With with some of Americans America’s culture sorry. American culture’s best features.

Malcolm Collins [19:26]:
Right. And some of black culture’s best features. Sure. The character in that was not, like, witless or something like that. He was depicted as wise. He was depicted as caring. He was depicted as loving. But that didn’t fit the narrative the NAACP wanted young black people seeing because they didn’t like the additional context that it evolved from.

Speaker 8 [19:54]:
Wonderful feeling feeling this way. You mean you leaving your old briar patch?

Speaker 9 [20:00]:
That I is.

Speaker 8 [20:02]:
Don’t you know you can’t run away from trouble?

Malcolm Collins [20:05]:
But to get to his character, to get to the wise black man trope or whatever that you often have come in and, like, give advice to a character in a movie, you have to go through the minstrel shows. And when you tear all that out, what you get in its place is the the the a completely invented, which is what I love, princess and the frog. And princess and the frog is a European story being redone on what is frankly while it isn’t an offensive racist caricature of this house, it is actually more of a racist caricature of what life was like during that period than uncle Remus was.

Simone Collins [20:55]:
But, also, they they have some pretty negative stereotypes around voodoo culture in that movie.

Malcolm Collins [21:01]:
Well, voodoo and voodoo culture. Voodoo is when black people practiced it. But yeah. Oh, wait.

Simone Collins [21:05]:
So what? Voodoo is only practiced by white

Malcolm Collins [21:07]:
people? Well, no. No. Voodoo is the culture from the islands. Voodoo is the culture from it’s the distinction doesn’t really matter, and they treat them as the same thing in the movie. Okay. The point being is that even like, if you look at this doctor Facilier in the in the movie Oh,

Simone Collins [21:21]:
is that the same? God. You have a good memory.

Malcolm Collins [21:23]:
And you look at things like the, well, there’s a great

Simone Collins [21:26]:
song about it. I love his song. It’s great. It’s a it’s a really good he’s a great character. It’s a but He’s not depicted flatteringly.

Malcolm Collins [21:32]:
Right. You look at the, you know, pin cushion voodoo dolls and stuff like this that you see. That has nothing to do with voodoo or hoodoo. That’s actually a European tradition.

Simone Collins [21:42]:
Oh, good heavens.

Malcolm Collins [21:44]:
It only became associated with voodoo and hoodoo during the voodoo scare of the I think it was the nineteen eighties. So

Simone Collins [21:52]:
Wait. You mean the same, like, this this this Satan, the

Malcolm Collins [21:56]:
the satanic panic? That demonized voodoo and hoodoo. There was a a sister scare to the satanic panic, I think, or it might

Simone Collins [22:02]:
have been

Malcolm Collins [22:02]:
a bit before. Okay. Okay. It might have been a bit earlier than that when they would did a bunch of, like, exploitation films around it. But the scare that happened around these traditions is what doctor Facilier is based on, not after actual

Simone Collins [22:18]:
Oh gosh. Okay. So, yeah, they they both demonize it, but also couch it from a caricature

Malcolm Collins [22:24]:
created by people who

Simone Collins [22:25]:
made it.

Malcolm Collins [22:25]:
Actual racist caricature with bad under both bad understandings and and malicious framing.

Simone Collins [22:34]:
Wow. This makes it so much worse. Oh, no.

Malcolm Collins [22:36]:
Uncle Remus is not maliciously framed. Right?

Simone Collins [22:39]:
No. No. He’s a scribble.

Malcolm Collins [22:40]:
Think about the things you can’t talk about. Like, in in American culture, situations in the South began to become known as tar babies. Right? Like, because of the stories of Briar Rabbit. Right? And so these were white people who were using a phrase, like, when you got into a sticky situation, you’re like, oh, that’s a tar baby, right, that I knew from growing up because I remember the story of Briar Rabbit and the tar baby. Mhmm. Right? And then black people said, that’s a racist term. You can’t say it because it was in a minority context used as a racial slur. And now all of a sudden, you can’t use it in its other context as well. And that’s erasing black culture black culture’s effect on American culture. And when people go down this particular rabbit hole, and and and and genuinely think, like, what you see in princess and the frog. You see the caricature of the big fair and everything, like, one with Mardi Gras.

Simone Collins [23:49]:
Oh. You know, you see the caricature

Malcolm Collins [23:50]:
of and even in princess and the frog, you see a friendship between a wealthy white family and a black girl. And yet it’s not a racist caricature because, oh, well, it doesn’t follow these exact tropes. It doesn’t point out that not every slave white relationship was entirely a negative one and that the situation was actually And

Simone Collins [24:17]:
then she they weren’t she wasn’t a slave. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [24:19]:
Well yeah. But the relationship she has with this white family is very paternalistic on the white family’s behalf.

Simone Collins [24:27]:
Sure. And there’s an obvious power distance. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [24:30]:
There’s an obvious power distance. Her mom works as a maid for the girl, if I remember correctly. And if I remember correctly, it’s very clear that the white family is I I just I’m gonna go on a side here. The princess and the frog, while I do think it’s a it’s sort of grotesque that they could replace real black culture with it, I do think it’s a genuinely good Disney movie.

Simone Collins [24:54]:
I know. I love almost there. It’s that’s a great song too. It teaches good work ethics.

Malcolm Collins [24:58]:
Yeah. Almost there, I think it’s great. She’s probably one of my favorite Disney princesses. For sure. Her attitude. Yes. She’d make a great wife. She’s like the one Disney princess where I’m like, yeah. You can really marry this girl.

Simone Collins [25:07]:
I’d I’d want my daughters to be into that kind of Disney princess.

Malcolm Collins [25:10]:
But not just she would make a good wife. They also did a very, very good job with her white friend in her family.

Simone Collins [25:17]:
Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Collins [25:17]:
Yeah. Because, typically, you get her character, and she’s bitchy or shellfish or unaware of her relative privilege or unaware of how her actions could make the other person feel bad. And it’s told very subtly. An example of this. do you remember at the end, where she needs a gown and the girl is like, well, you can just take one of my gowns. Right? And then she gives her a blue gown. and the the problem is is you’ve seen her closet. She wears nothing but prank frilly outfits. This is clearly a gown that she had bought specifically for her friend knowing she wouldn’t have a gown, done up in her friend’s style, and then pretended it was her own gown to not make her friend

Simone Collins [26:08]:
Yeah. Because Tiana would never say yes to having a good look that.

Malcolm Collins [26:10]:
It’s shown that Tiana would never say yes or the way that they give Tiana money where they order a bunch of stuff from her as an excuse. Oh, I’ll I’ll I’ll just order a bunch of stuff for you to give you money. It’s it’s shown very sweetly and throughout the entire show. The well, I mean, and this character thought she was gonna marry the prince. The moment she realizes that, oh, no. The real prince is someone who Tiana loves she’s happy for her. She wants Yeah.

Simone Collins [26:34]:
Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [26:35]:
Yeah. Her to do her thing. Probably good for her too because then she goes after the prince’s younger brother, and that’s a good way to get that. You know, become really good with his sister-in-law. You know? If you’re gonna if you’re gonna go for that, go for it. You know?

Simone Collins [26:51]:
I’m gonna You know? Yeah. Get your bag.

Malcolm Collins [26:54]:
Yeah. Yeah. Get your bag. But it it’s such a shame that that’s sort of the last of that type of Disney movie that was ever made, like, the last of the good Disney movies.

Simone Collins [27:04]:
Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [27:04]:
The the villains post doctor Fassalier have sucked.

Simone Collins [27:10]:
No. Villains have just been the heroines. I mean, look. Except for Tomatea. Tomatea was pretty good. I don’t remember. Tomatea is

Malcolm Collins [27:18]:
the giant crab from one zero one.

Simone Collins [27:20]:
Oh, yeah. He’s, yeah, shiny. Very good. Very good. Yes.

Malcolm Collins [27:29]:
But, no, this is this is where when you see something like the NAACP, when you burn down we like, I honestly don’t understand how anyone thought black culture was gonna survive this. Ripping out everything that racism had ever touched.

Simone Collins [27:46]:
Yeah. Or, I mean, like, just a lot of you know, if, obviously, there’s baggage, but I don’t know. Like, a positive depiction is a positive depiction. Like, the Aunt Jemima restaurant that was super popular for a long period of time. Like, it was a popular family restaurant that people liked, and Jemima’s syrup bottles. Like, I remember having them as a kid, and I always wanted them because it was a nice lady in a dress. It wasn’t like, I’m gonna dehumanize these people. There there were restaurants

Malcolm Collins [28:19]:
that were meant to dehumanize black people.

Simone Collins [28:22]:
Like Right. And there are restaurants that are meant to dehumanize busty women, but, like, I don’t know. We don’t call those,

Malcolm Collins [28:29]:
I guess, is the thing that gets me. Right? Is the one type of restaurant gets removed, the other type of restaurant remains. And in the process of ripping out that restaurant, you end up ripping out a bunch of stuff that actually preserved and glorified black culture.

Simone Collins [28:46]:
Yeah. I mean, similar to, like, rainforest cafes to be like, this is, you know, an insult to the concept of rainforests. Well, yeah, it is. But it also, like, gets a lot of young kids into the idea of rainforests and conservation and frogs. And, like, it’s it is it is a piece of ambassadorship, which, though problematic, has its merits.

Malcolm Collins [29:07]:
Well, I mean, we’ve seen this in the school system. Even when I was a kid, they’re already beginning to phase out Huckleberry Finn because it used the n word too much. Right?

Simone Collins [29:13]:
Like they just, I don’t know, censor just that one word

Malcolm Collins [29:16]:
and be like did in some, but I I don’t it’s it’s the character’s name. Wait. Inward Jim?

Simone Collins [29:24]:
Oh, I forgot that.

Malcolm Collins [29:26]:
When I talk about the restaurants meant to dehumanize people, I’m look I’m talking about stuff like Coon Chicken Inn.

Simone Collins [29:31]:
Oh, right.

Malcolm Collins [29:32]:
Stuff like aunt Jemima, it clearly wasn’t meant to dehumanize black people.

Simone Collins [29:37]:
I didn’t know there was a place called Koon Chicken Inn. Good god.

Malcolm Collins [29:40]:
Based on a caricature which people have labeled as racist, like the mammy caricature. That said, it’s important to differentiate caricatures that have racial tones and caricatures that are meant to here’s what I mean. Other groups when I grew up, my school had a picture. This was on all of our gyms. I remember it very clearly. It was a little Irishman with his fists up like this.

Simone Collins [30:10]:
Oh, yeah. No. Isn’t that a just a sports team mascot? The fighting Irish. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s for the specific sports team, though.

Malcolm Collins [30:18]:
I wouldn’t have other sports teams have used it. It’s it’s actually a common sports team mascot, the fighting Irish. A a little fighting Irish like, Irish

Simone Collins [30:26]:
We know all know exactly what you mean.

Malcolm Collins [30:28]:
But the point I’m making here is that if you go in and you eradicate, you say, we don’t want that anymore, you erase part of what is genuine Irish culture. Right?

Simone Collins [30:41]:
When Notre Dame? When you Yeah. Notre Dame.

Malcolm Collins [30:44]:
Something that is a caricature. So let let me give you an example of what I mean by when you erase the caricature, you erase the culture.

Simone Collins [30:54]:
Oh, no. What? No. They’re trying to erase the fighting Irish. The the old logo was him being like, and the new logo is just him marching forward with a football with a resting bitch face.

Malcolm Collins [31:05]:
That’s so annoying. It is really annoying. Everybody knows the Irish are quick to fight. Yeah. Come on, man. These people.

Simone Collins [31:12]:
Yeah. Even my favorite Irish comedian on YouTube has confirmed this.

Malcolm Collins [31:18]:
What’s Russell Crowe Irish or something just going around the world fighting people? What?

Simone Collins [31:22]:
I don’t I don’t know, but that sounds great, so let’s just believe it. So Yeah. Check that.

Speaker 4 [31:27]:
He loves to act, but he loves one thing more, fight around the world. He fights his directors and he fights his fans. It’s a problem no one understands. If there’s two things he loves, it’s fighting and Fighting around the world.

Malcolm Collins [31:41]:
No. No. The the here’s what I’ll explain. This will immediately make sense to you. You’re be like, oh my god. Yeah. Like, that is actually kind of gruesome. So you go to a black person, and you tell them growing up, you know what’s disgusting? This depiction of black people getting together and doing a barbecue and frying eating fried chicken and eating watermelon and playing music, and and and that’s a disgusting caricature. And then, you know, the the the granddad is there, and they’re like, that’s what we did every week. What what are you talking about? Like, what what of the things you just mentioned is negative?

Simone Collins [32:17]:
Well, I know. And you just mentioned a bunch of things that, like, our families have done. And if someone came to us, I’d be like

Malcolm Collins [32:23]:
I I have another episode I’ll do eventually on how much black culture took from Scots Irish culture and that they’re very closely cultured.

Simone Collins [32:30]:
Versa because I thought banjos were like a Scots Irish thing.

Malcolm Collins [32:33]:
Well, no. They they they culturally transmitted a lot. Oh, yeah. What the Scotts Irish were known for doing is they didn’t really care who invented a a culture or technology. It it Yeah. If it

Simone Collins [32:43]:
was good, you I’m guessing gonna steal it. I’m gonna tell you. I don’t care

Malcolm Collins [32:46]:
if any of American did it. I don’t care if black people did it, but that’s why they had so much more intercultural exchange with black culture than the other American cultural groups. Mhmm. and it’s also when the blacks saw another culture adopting their stuff, they adopted more of that culture stuff, and you had much more cultural interplay, which is how you get stuff like country music adopting so much of earlier black cultural ideas. Blues music, folk music, etcetera, which come out of this particular region. But the point here being is you take a collection of stuff that is not bad. There is nothing negative about eating watermelons. There is nothing negative about liking fried chicken. There’s nothing negative about having regular family get togethers where you talk and eat these things. There’s nothing negative about having the the the the comic jokes about the large black family that would all get together because the the before the the breaking apart of black families, they used to do this. This where the commentary of Well, also generation of black families get together, and they joke, and they have these conversations. And then people saw that, and they a comedian would do it, and they go, that’s a racist caricature. It’s like, no. It’s so screwed

Simone Collins [33:57]:
up because you know who else likes watermelon a lot? Who? The Japanese. They [bleep] love watermelon. Suica. They they love it so like, I’ve been when I traveled to Japan, like, you just be let’s let’s all sit down and just eat watermelon together. It was like an event food. It was so popular that at the time and I think this is still the case. Like, the metro card of Tokyo, like, broader area was called Suica. Like, this is a culture that freaking loves watermelon. But if you were like, oh, those Japanese people, they love watermelon. Like, no one’s going to have an aneurysm. So it’s so much so messed up. Like, why why if black people like something and then people talk about it? Like, are we is this a problem? Why why, one, are they not allowed to like it? And two, why is them liking stuff a problem?

Malcolm Collins [34:44]:
But the bigger problem is how this affects black youth and the way that they perceive their own identity. When you grow up as the BLM movement did and said that black culture is a culture that is antagonistic to the nuclear family. Mhmm. Right? That that has nothing to do with black culture, that we’re about polyamory. We’re about whatever. And then you look at how could you think that as a black person? That is the least black thing in the world if you’re talking about American black black culture. American black culture, if you put together do you if you remember these old black comedies from, like, the nineties or whatever, and you’d see what the joke version of a black family looks like, it was typically three or sometimes four generations of a family with extended relative networks all sitting down at a long table, joking, making fun of each other, etcetera.

Speaker 5 [35:41]:
Oh, this is so fabulous. Ain’t nothing like getting together with family and having a good meal.

Speaker 7 [35:45]:
You know, in my day, Sherman, people used to spend time with their family on Sundays and special occasion come around and pay their respects. You messing around and miss all over Ernest Golden years, magic Golden years, you’re gonna be mad at yourself.

Speaker 6 [35:58]:
I cooked all this food. Is that all you gonna eat? Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. What’s wrong with you? Supposed to eat that thing, not scalp it. Well, daddy, all the calories in the chicken are found in the skin and in the fat, so I peel talking about is where all the fat and calories is. You know where that come from? Watching that damn TV.

Malcolm Collins [36:11]:
And people said, oh, that’s a

Simone Collins [36:13]:
racist caricature. And so then the next generation A cohesive family. Great.

Malcolm Collins [36:18]:
Yeah. The the next generation grows up and being like, a large cohesive family is a racist caricature, so I’m gonna do the opposite.

Simone Collins [36:26]:
Oh my gosh. The co op is not okay about

Malcolm Collins [36:30]:
man who who mentors a child of the racist caricature. So let’s do gangs and drugs and hate the police because that’s the the furthest thing from the racist caricature. This is how black culture got cooked. And you and you see these other things like the black Sambo case where it was a story of humorously originally about an Indian character, but when it’s translated into United States, it became a black character it was about a clever child who would, like, outwist tigers and stuff. Okay. They were beloved children’s books, and then but they looked too much like a racist caricature, so they get rid of it. They get rid of the parts of our culture that that could be attached to anything. By the way, if you’re wondering about my claim, the cakewalk was a dance tied to early syncopatic march music. It syncopas to the two four rhythm that became the foundation of ragtime. Scott Jawful’s maple leaf rag from 1899 is the canonical cakewalk adjacent piece from ragtime in line runs straight into early New Orleans jazz, then swing, then rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. The syncopization that made the cakewalk distinctive is the same rhythmic innovation that became the backbone of nearly all American popular music.

Simone Collins [37:51]:
I had no idea.

Malcolm Collins [37:52]:
I no idea. Black people don’t grow up learning this. They grow up learning how racist the cakewalk was.

Simone Collins [38:00]:
What’s really cool, you go to the Wikipedia page about cakewalks, there’s an animated GIF. I didn’t know that Wikipedia did that. That’s a nice improvement.

Malcolm Collins [38:05]:
This is also where you get things like the tap dancing. Black performers develop tap from African rhythmic tradition That was fused with

Simone Collins [38:12]:
Irish [bleep]. Bull.

Malcolm Collins [38:14]:
And they were the ones who innovated the form. Bill Bojangles Robinson, then Nicholas Burnson, great black tappers of the Vaudeville era. You it’s erased. It’s erased. They this is this is all erased by the NAACP.

Simone Collins [38:34]:
That is that is wild. That’s really

Malcolm Collins [38:39]:
By the way, the briar rabbit story came directly from the West African trickster traditions. The hare and the spider and zazi were the classic trickster

Simone Collins [38:48]:
Or or anansi. Anansi.

Malcolm Collins [38:50]:
The enslaved black Africans adopted them, and briar rabbit became the central underdog archetype. The small, weak creature that outwits through wit and deception, which adapted heavily from when I say it adapted heavily from Jack Tails, because you can see this cultural transmission had already happened. In Africa, this character is magical, and uses magic to perform its tricks. Whereas if you look at the Jacktail traditions, it’s also about a small underdog character, but he never uses magic. and that’s a very distinctive thing about the Jacktail tradition. It’s

Simone Collins [39:26]:
always trickery.

Malcolm Collins [39:27]:
You also see in the briar rabbit tradition. Never uses magic. because they did already fused enough with the Protestant tradition where we saw that as, you don’t wanna be teaching kids that magic is a good thing or a cool thing or anything like that. It’s better to use pure wit.

Simone Collins [39:45]:
Wow. There’s this really interesting pattern with all of our episodes about something related to black people, which is, oh my gosh. Why have they been so screwed over, but not in any of the ways that anyone says? Yeah. So And the very people who pretend to defend them, which is They

Malcolm Collins [40:02]:
well, that’s because they let the fox in the henhouse. The NACP is the biggest threat and has been the biggest deteriorator of black culture. now fun, by the way. So remember I said that it was common in this era when everyone’s like, menstruals, menstruals, menstruals are so bad. They make themselves look like idiots. the stooges predicted themselves as lazy, stupid buffoons. So were the Marx brothers. So were Laurel and Hardy. So were Abbott and Costello. Almost all of the most famous comedic performers of this era did this routine.

Simone Collins [40:35]:
Oh, yeah. No. Even in, the the the Christmas classic, White Christmas, they do a a menstrual bit. A minstrel. Sorry. A minstrel bit.

Malcolm Collins [40:44]:
Yeah. And and they’re like, well, when it’s black people doing them, it’s about all of black culture. That’s what they’re making fun of. And it’s like, no. You chose to make it that. It might have been about that at the very beginning of the tradition, but the tradition had evolved into a position where it didn’t need to mean that anymore. It even became

Simone Collins [41:05]:
yeah. I mean, I I

Malcolm Collins [41:06]:
think became it uncle Remus. It didn’t need to be malicious. You guys decided to make it universally malicious.

Simone Collins [41:14]:
It started in the twelfth century as a form of entertainment. It remained a form of entertainment. I I feel like nothing changed. It’s just that, like, one one group was like, oh, this one this one subset of people who engaged in this form of entertainment were were horrible and, like, doing committing atrocities. I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins [41:35]:
So so for for more context here, the minstrel show had a structure. The end men, mister Tombow or mister Bones, at either end of the stage trading jokes with the interlocutor in the middle. The end men were the comics, and the interlocutor played the straight man. That’s the ancestor of the modern comedy set, the comic on stage, the rapid fire joke delivery, callbacks, and the comic persona. The structure of American stand up, the opening bit, the rhythm of the setup, the punchline, the character the comedian plays was developed in the minstrel format. The the shave and haircut rhythm, the two bits ending, and the call and response of American joke structures all come from this.

Simone Collins [42:15]:
Well, this explains that white Christmas song because they kept saying things like, oh, mister Bones, you’re terrible. And that explains mister Bones. Oh my gosh. Wow. So, yeah, is a formalized format here.

Malcolm Collins [42:26]:
Well, this is the funniest thing. This is where you hear the mister you just realized, oh, this is part of black American cultural history.

Simone Collins [42:33]:
God forbid, I know that. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [42:36]:
But you can’t know this today. We can’t

Simone Collins [42:38]:
talk about this today. Yes. Yes.

Malcolm Collins [42:40]:
Yes. The sitcom is also of direct descent. The mistrial shows stable cast of comic archetypes and recurring characters at the end minutes of comic foils. That structure had become the sitcom with Amos and Andy being a direct descendant of mistrial shows.

Simone Collins [42:58]:
Right. So crazy. That is so crazy.

Malcolm Collins [43:00]:
Later evolved into things like I love Lucy and the honeymooners.

Simone Collins [43:04]:
Yeah. Which is so slapstick and funny and delightful.

Malcolm Collins [43:08]:
Yeah. And nobody’s like, oh, you can’t have the the reason why Lucy like, let’s take something like Lucy or the honeymooners. Like, straight to the moon. you know? Or I love Lucy. Like, oh, I’m such an idiot. Right? Like, we watch these shows, and you could say, well, she’s not depicting every American housewife. And it’s like, I would beg to disagree. Lucy absolutely represented an arch type of all American women.

Simone Collins [43:37]:
Yeah. Lucy Lucy is the black face of of American housewives. And it wasn’t necessarily a positive stereotype. No. Not at all. No. Mean, also delightful and funny. So I don’t know. You know, it’s again, is it problematic? Yes. Is it funny and and delightful in a an institution culturally? Yes. Like, come on.

Malcolm Collins [43:56]:
The the mini characters, you could look at the Simpsons. Is the Simpsons supposed to depict all white American culture and families? Well, I mean, yeah, kinda. That was kinda the point. And you have a dad who strangles his child every time he gets mad and is an idiot. And who is it

Simone Collins [44:14]:
Honey, you have an Indian, like, seven eleven. I mean Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [44:17]:
Who isn’t properly trained? No. But the the the reason

Simone Collins [44:19]:
You have a Scottish grounds people Yes. Mean, it’s not the way. Reason I’m focused, Simone.

Malcolm Collins [44:24]:
The reason I’m focused on the family Yes. Is I’m not talking about every racial stereotype in the show.

Simone Collins [44:28]:
Okay.

Malcolm Collins [44:29]:
The point I’m making is you can have a negative stereotype still be a positive cultural force. The family of Homer, how how how did much did that impact American culture? If we went back and we erased because it would check every box the minstrel does, is Homer a a negative stereotype of a bumbling worse than minstrels because he’s also aggressive and abusive idiot character, right, who’s bad at his job as a risk to all of society. Truly. About to blow up a nuclear plant constantly. Yeah. Is he a depiction of the average white family and what that very clearly meant to be understood of your average middle class white family in America or lower middle class? Absolutely. Was he a stereotype being drawn by, let’s be honest, mostly upper class people in Hollywood who genuinely looked down on middle class Americans? Yes. He was a stereotype being drawn from people in another cultural group who looked down upon people of that stereotype and meant to this in a derogatory fashion. Yet if we went through and we scrubbed American culture of the Simpsons, how much of Americana would we lose? Now imagine we apply the same rules to everything. We apply the same rules to the three Stooges. We apply the see the same rules to all all the other comedians I went through. And we apply the same rules to you just lose it. You lose American history. And yet this is what was done to black American history.

Simone Collins [46:15]:
That’s really messed up. It’s super messed up.

Malcolm Collins [46:18]:
and this is why it is incredibly racist in terms of the downstream effects to stigmatize blackface. Yeah.

Simone Collins [46:30]:
There’s so many things in here, but I I think the saddest thing is you just pointed out a whole bunch of things that came from black culture that I didn’t even know came from black culture largely as a product of all of this erasure and and refusal to include certain bits of media in our, you know, accepted set, which is messed up. Like, shouldn’t black culture get credit for that? You know?

Malcolm Collins [46:54]:
No. But I think the how much content have you watched about the taking down of the the the Disney attraction thing?

Simone Collins [47:05]:
Oh, so much. Like, hours worth.

Malcolm Collins [47:06]:
Okay. Okay. Had you once heard that the primary music type was invented in Africa or that the ride was

Simone Collins [47:13]:
based on traditional like in fact, it’s almost not mentioned at all. It’s like song of the South. It just like, all they had to do was say, well, it was associated with song of the South, which we all know is horribly racist and, like, this, like, scourge on Disney’s history that we must never mention. It was like the Voldemort of Disney’s history. We must not mention it at all. And and so it really wasn’t mentioned at all. Like, in fact, I didn’t know any of this stuff about, you know, the the actual history. I mean, I remember watching some of the South as a kid and, like, enjoying it, but that was it. That’s Yeah. Wild. So crazy.

Malcolm Collins [47:51]:
I I appreciate that I was able to educate you. Hopefully, I was able to educate our audience. And, we can realize that just because a portion of something’s history was racist in nature or especially because if if you say we are going to rip out everything that was racist or derogatory derogatory against black, you rip out black culture, and then you rip out the point. You rip out the way that American culturally works, which is two groups making fun of each other. You don’t get the cakewalk without this the black version of the Mistral Show. And you don’t get all American music without the cakewalk. It invented the and and by the way, I think ragtime is the first form of music that I think is good. I do not like classical music. I don’t like anything like that. So every form of music that I personally like is downstream of the innovation that came from the cakewalk.

Simone Collins [48:46]:
I can vouch for this. Malcolm is not just making this up.

Malcolm Collins [48:48]:
He really likes ragtime music.

Simone Collins [48:51]:
Like, it doesn’t make I I can’t say I guess I I thought you you took some, like, course on music history through the great courses and were like, and ragtime is the best. I that’s all I kinda remember. Well, that’s why I learned

Malcolm Collins [49:03]:
about this. I learned about the development of the American theatrical tradition and the influence that black Americans had on that, but that influence was through the minstrel shows. Mhmm. During a time of racism, that’s how they were able to have influence. And and when the minstrel shows get erased, when the minstrel shows get to said they were nothing but bad, they were nothing but racist, we miss this cultural conversation that led to current American culture. And it’s it’s wild to me as well that the form of if you ask blacks today, what is black American culture? They’d likely say like, the first thing it it walked on their mind is gonna be rap music. It’s gonna be gangster culture. It’s gonna be gangster dress. It’s not gonna be jazz. It’s not gonna be rag time

Simone Collins [50:00]:
Hip hop. I don’t know.

Malcolm Collins [50:02]:
Yeah. It’s even hip hop. Hip hop is associated with crime. Hip hop is associated with degeneracy. Mhmm. It’s not going to be the parts of black culture that genuinely uplifted or had a cultural path to uplift the American black community. Right? Because those are the parts that were developed, oh, no, during this this pre time before they had to start from scratch, before they had to say, oh, we won’t look to these old forms of music and how we develop going forward, which is really sad.

Simone Collins [50:38]:
It’s really sad.

Malcolm Collins [50:39]:
but I’m glad I was able to blow your mind about this because the moment I told you I’m gonna do an episode on the history of blackface and why condemning it so aggressively rather than saying, yes. It was used in a racial context in the past and in a racist context in the past, but it’s not the same as the n word or slavery or something like that. And that once it’s removed, it’s sort of like the Jenga piece that knocks over the rest of the the the Jenga tower that is black history. It’s the one block you can’t remove.

Simone Collins [51:14]:
Well, I will see if YouTube’s algorithm can fathom that level of nuance, which I don’t think is that hard to fathom. But, look, they couldn’t figure out when we are trying to say that hipster is a bad sorry, that Hitler is a bad person.

Malcolm Collins [51:29]:
Yeah. They’re like, what? Hitler is a bad person because his ideas were as often as progressive as they were conservative and that he fits into modern progressive archetypes much more than conservative ones. How dare you? So that that hit hit that hit us with a channel strike.

Simone Collins [51:44]:
So I don’t know if you’re gonna be able to make it through this one, but that for that reason, thank you to everyone who subscribes to us on Substack and Patreon.

Malcolm Collins [51:51]:
Thank you guys so much. It means so much to us. And then

Simone Collins [51:55]:
we can a a backup because Malcolm’s he’s he’d be speedrunning it. And I I just outlined another episode about Indian culture that might also not help us. So great.

Malcolm Collins [52:07]:
Restrude. I think that this is where the real cultural conversation happens. This is where racism actually ends. It’s having the real conversation.

Simone Collins [52:15]:
Yes. Shutting it down is how you make it a problem instead of just having discourse.

Malcolm Collins [52:20]:
The light of truth burns away evil. Right? You know? That that that is the the end state of this, and this is why progressives the algorithm can’t let us talk about that for like this because it it would have the races be like, oh, okay. Yeah. That makes sense. You’re clearly not coming at this from a Pearl clutching perspective. So I’ll I’ll take you seriously. But and and I will mitigate my views based on this. And we have a lot of you who have been like, yeah. I’m significantly less racist because of your show. But we’d also really encourage you if you if you like our stuff, rfab.ai. This episode was entirely filmed and edited on rfab. We have moved to those features being mostly stable at this point, and that’s really exciting for us, because that means we’re able to move away from some other editing software. And I’m able to try some fun editing tricks that only our fab can do, like the bleeps that you have had around stuff that might make YouTube mad in this. Like the I’ll show off a little feature I’ve been working on right now.

Speaker 11 [53:28]:
This is my first time testing this feature, so let’s see if it works.

Malcolm Collins [53:31]:
The we got the looping video feature that I built. I thought that was pretty fun for, like, monetizing things.

Simone Collins [53:37]:
Sleek. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [53:40]:
And yeah. Even if you’re like, I don’t like playing the AI adventure story that you have on our FAB, fine. There’s there’s probably something on it that is something you’d like to do. Right?

Simone Collins [53:50]:
No. Actually, I don’t use them at all except that Yes. We have a lot. I use the image generation. I use the fact checking. I use the based AI. I used I I use oh my gosh. Oh, yeah. You were saying

Malcolm Collins [54:03]:
this video also had to be entirely researched with the based AI feature on our FAB because Yeah. Grock wouldn’t give me serious answers to these questions. Yeah. it just kept hedging everything, and I just couldn’t get any information out of it.

Simone Collins [54:14]:
Yeah. Even though Grok is the de facto, like, based LLM that people turn to, no. You need to use Rhodes, and you can get it super easy at our FAB. Yeah. That that it’s actually based. Because I also found that I couldn’t use Grok, to do my episode research. Oh, so you used Rhodes as well. Mhmm.

Malcolm Collins [54:31]:
So we’re moving more towards an all our fab ecosystem.

Simone Collins [54:34]:
I mean, the recipe generation system on Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins [54:37]:
If you’re just a housewife, check

Simone Collins [54:38]:
it out. You can lock the site in a safe harbor. A housewife, yeah, you can also use our devices, which are not our devices. You just buy them separately. We don’t make any money from that. But, like, you can make companion devices that are tutors for your kids. For the girls, I made an animated tutor named Thetis, who is a mermaid woman. And then I made Cudish, a chick that our boys like the a chicken a baby chicken.

Malcolm Collins [55:00]:
And these work in a few modes. They can work with regular companions, or they can work with, like, living avatars that are, like, fully animated characters based on the leaflet system. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a little much to put together for It’s

Simone Collins [55:11]:
a little much. You can do it.

Malcolm Collins [55:12]:
You know? The other But I I

Simone Collins [55:14]:
can I can pretend to be cutish, can’t I? Let’s see. We’re still working on this one, but, look, I can be cutish too.

Malcolm Collins [55:19]:
Oh, yeah. That’s that’s one of

Simone Collins [55:21]:
the features that I have.

Malcolm Collins [55:22]:
What’s what’s another feature that I’ve been working

Simone Collins [55:24]:
a lot on? This is Thetis as proof. She’s loading. She’s Better better storytelling.

Malcolm Collins [55:30]:
Oh, yes. The one thing I’d say, probably the the single most useful feature that Artfab has that isn’t even that obvious if you’re milling around our fab right now. and this feature is sort of a core part of my daily life is the API. If you do vibe coding and you’re not using the our fab API, you are at a massive disadvantage.

Simone Collins [55:49]:
Yeah. It creates, really cool animations. It’s very efficient.

Malcolm Collins [55:52]:
Yeah. Yeah. If you if you explore the site or use the site, you’ll notice animations of a cat girl. You can easily create that and just put it animations, put images all throughout your website with the RFAB API, and make it so that your own AI can call you while it’s working. So if you’re using, like, Claude Fable or something like that and you wanna go on a walk, you can set it up with the Artfab API just in its background memory doc so that it calls you when it reaches a stopping point and asks for what to do next.

Simone Collins [56:19]:
And it it actually does this. It’s kind of weird because Malcolm will just pick up a call at dinner or, like, while we’re on a shopping trip, and he’ll be like, okay. Like, do this. Don’t do this. Call me back when you’re done. And I’m like, who is that? And and it’s like, you know, it’s just our Survive coding agent.

Malcolm Collins [56:35]:
Oh oh, and by the way, for people who’ve been using the site for a while and you haven’t gone back to these features, one of the things we added recently that I’m very excited about is the brainstorming features that brainstorm the beginnings of adventures for you and and companions, and we have, like, a lot of these. Now you can fully customize the prompt and the prompt structure on those. So, you control and and control what AI runs in them. So you control those completely now. Those are those are completely user controllable now. We also the narrative engine is way stronger than it used to be because now it builds memory and lore books to better remember facts and and and drift less. So lots of fun things for you to play around with. We also got audio to audio feature now if it’s been a while since you didn’t know that, you can do it from

Simone Collins [57:18]:
your phone. I need to use that more because I can’t read anything.

Malcolm Collins [57:21]:
I also recently added a feature, hide covers, where if you’re using on a bus or something, but you wanna do not save for work stuff, it hides the cover images.

Simone Collins [57:29]:
I didn’t know you did that.

Malcolm Collins [57:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins [57:32]:
Dude. Okay. Well I

Malcolm Collins [57:37]:
love you.

Simone Collins [57:37]:
I love you too. Gee whiz.

Malcolm Collins [57:42]:
You are amazing, and thank you for your time.

Simone Collins [57:46]:
Thank you for your time.

Malcolm Collins [57:47]:
No. It’s just the mic was far away.

Simone Collins [57:48]:
Okay. You fixed it. Thank you. Thank you very, very much.

Malcolm Collins [57:53]:
I love you very, very much, Simone. You’re a great wife. I love you so forward to a fried rice dinner with fancy hibachi steak, but, obviously, cut the steak smaller.

Simone Collins [58:04]:
Oh, is there steak in the fried rice? Yes. Okay. So I pick it up, and I it, and then I

Malcolm Collins [58:12]:
Shut up. You’re so mean.

Simone Collins [58:15]:
You you said you’ve said in the past that you wanted to julienned. You julienned carrots. No one I guess people julienned meat. Clearly, now I do. I love you.

Malcolm Collins [58:27]:
And and cut the vegetable smaller too. I noticed you didn’t for Octavians.

Simone Collins [58:31]:
Yeah. Because humans eat vegetables that are this big. It’s I do you is it a swallowing thing, actually? Because you don’t like swallowing pills.

Malcolm Collins [58:44]:
Yeah. I don’t like swallowing big pieces of meat. That was one of the reasons I didn’t eat a lot at the restaurant. The the chunks they gave were just way too big.

Simone Collins [58:50]:
You chew them with your teeth. I don’t like chewing things.

Malcolm Collins [59:01]:
Do I know you so much?

Simone Collins [59:04]:
Don’t make me chew my food.

Malcolm Collins [59:08]:
You have to spend your life with me.

Simone Collins [59:11]:
You know what’s so funny though? It’s one of the most endearing things you do that I just love so much, and it’s so stupid, but it’s the sound of you chewing. I really like the sound of you chewing. It’s so cute. It’s like a little guinea pig and some celery, and I just love it. And you don’t even wanna do it. You don’t even wanna chew your food when it’s so cute. I think it goes to show too how, like, when people are actually in love, all this stuff that people cite as annoying them if you hate someone is the same stuff that is, like, the cutest and most wonderful thing in the world if you love them, and that’s so weird.

Malcolm Collins [59:53]:
Oh my gosh.

Simone Collins [59:54]:
Okay. Don’t love your chewing. I love you, but that means that your chewing is

Malcolm Collins [59:59]:
the best kind everyone said they get sick of. It’s like chewing or whatever. Yeah.

Simone Collins [60:03]:
They’re disgusting chewing. No. It’s so cute. Oh gosh. It it it it it hurts my heart to hear that you have this strong distaste for chewing your own food. And what how how many years have I known you? And I didn’t know that you disliked chewing and you what you’re saying.

Malcolm Collins [60:23]:
Chewing until I thought about it, and I was like, yeah. I guess my favorite dishes don’t involve lots of chewing.

Simone Collins [60:27]:
You know what? Chewing is fake and gay. I’m never doing it again.

Malcolm Collins [60:33]:
Okay.

Simone Collins [60:34]:
Maybe once we make the big bucks and give everyone vampire canines, we’ll, we’ll like chewing again. What do

Malcolm Collins [60:42]:
you think? You are I you are so fun. You are beyond fun. That’s just her plan, by the way. She wants vampire canines.

Simone Collins [60:54]:
Yeah. For me and her. You’ll you’ll know we’ve actually made money where I’m not, like, worried about food and heat security and everything else when, like, we suddenly show up with vampire teeth. And it’s like, oh, okay. They feel comfortable with their finances. They have so much excess. You’re so weird. Not as weird as you. Not as weird as you.

Malcolm Collins [61:20]:
So I’ll get started here.

Speaker 10 [61:21]:
That’s correct. 123. Go. What’s stuck in our garden? I was telling you that it’s too small. Okay.

Show Notes

A July 2024 Reddit post in r/rapecounseling by a user identifying as a high-school-age female volunteer describes being raped for several hours and nearly killed by “one refugee guy” she had been helping weekly at a refugee support organization and temporary accommodations.

• She wrote that she had been assisting families, talking with them and their children, and helping with integration; “uncomfortable things happened from some guys” but she continued because she felt she was doing good.

• After the assault she lost her virginity to him, faced blame from some family/friends for volunteering in the first place, and questioned whether she had given “wrong signals” or dressed inappropriately relative to “their culture and religion.”

• The post is unsubstantiated and received little engagement.

OP ultimately deleted her post.

Ultimately, when it comes to aid work:

• Organizations seem to be systematically under-reporting cases of rape

  • Sometimes refusing to report it entirely

• Most cases that get coverage have to do with organizational reporting, perhaps because it’s the one thing orgs think they can control

• When it comes to attacks by outsiders, the only place you see people opening up candidly is among volunteers on places like reddit

  • And the craziest thing about women’s own accounts is both:

    • How universal and distressing the women find harassment to be

    • How ultimately dismissive they are of it, in a way that reminds me an awful lot of colonial-era texts I’ve read

Let’s get into it.

Scant Reporting

The Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) has tracked major violent incidents against aid workers since 1997, records rape/serious sexual assault as a category.

• Here’s their 2025 report

• The report does not provide a number of reported rapes in 2025. Its provisional mid-year figures report roughly 230 aid-worker deaths through 30 June 2025, but it does not publish a rape or sexual-assault total for that period.

  • The report does not say that rape was unreported, nor does it give a reason for omitting a 2025 rape total.

  • Rape and sexual assault are within AWSD’s tracked incident categories, but the report’s 2025 discussion and tables present only killings, serious injuries, kidnappings, and arrests/detentions—not a separate sexual-violence count. Therefore, no defensible 2025 rape total can be extracted from this report.

• The report’s compilers explicitly flag underreporting as big problem in several contexts, especially in Sudan and with organizations refusing to report incidents because they might be nervous about losing funding

• They also have criteria that make many genuine incidents not get counted

  • E.g. if someone was not kidnapped or detained for at least 24 hours, IT DOESN’T COUNT

  • If someone was assaulted and not “seriously injured” IT DOESN’T COUNT

    • Their full criteria

      • Killing

      • Kidnapping lasting more than 24 hours

      • Serious injury

      • Rape or sexual assault

      • Arrest or detention lasting more than 24 hours — a category AWSD began tracking distinctly in 2025.